One of the things people have always believed about modern media is that video beats audio and audio beats the written word. Before the rise of “new media” on the internet, this meant television was better than radio and radio better than newspapers. In the internet age, the assumption now is that live streamers have greater reach than podcasters and podcasters have a greater reach than bloggers. Mixed in there are people who exist only as entities on social media platforms.
One reason for this assumption is youth culture. In liberal democracy, the young are treated like gods, in the same way novel social ideas are treated as gifts from the gods, so whatever young people like is heralded as pure and beautiful. Young people, especially children, are first drawn to images, then sounds and finally as they mature into adults, the written word. In modern liberal democracies, therefore, video platforms are treated like sacred altars where our most sacred members perform.
The youth culture phenomenon has co-evolved with the rise of mass media. In the days before mass media, young people were at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy. The first flicker of youth culture in America was the jazz age, but even there the people driving it were old by modern standards. The characters in The Great Gatsby, for example, are mostly early middle-aged. It was after the war with the explosion of Hollywood that youth culture blossomed into the centerpiece of modern life.
Another reason why video maintains a privileged place at the top of our social hierarchy is Baby Boomer culture. For Boomers, for whom mass media evolved, video was always the top. In the golden age of television, for example, the whole country would watch popular television programs. No newspaper or radio broadcaster had the reach of a popular television program. Hitting the big time in the field of news or entertainment meant getting on TV or in the movies.
As much as young people, and not so young people, complain about the Baby Boom generation, the Boomers still control the culture. That is plainly obvious with the panic over the Chinese virus. If the Boomers were twenty years younger, the virus would rate a few mentions in the New York Times science section. Since Boomers are now deeply involved in the health care system, anything medical is going to be of utmost importance to everyone. It is why nurses are now heroes.
Putting all that aside, there is a curious truth about these different platforms that has gone unnoticed. The actual reach of video these days is much lower than the past and probably at the bottom of the hierarchy. For example, Tucker Carlson is the most popular cable talker. He gets about three million viewers per night. The regular audience for cable chat shows is probably around ten million people. The New York Times has more readers than that. Same with other news sites.
On the internet, where it is much more difficult to gate-keep the content, the disparities are even more stark. Popular live streamers get a few thousand live views and their replays get 20-30 thousand views. A variation of the Pareto Principle is clear as day as a handful of top streamers dominate the view counts while 90% or more are small fish with small viewer counts. The gamer PewDiePie, for example, probably accounts for half of D-Live’s traffic, maybe even more of it.
In the political realm, the data is starker. Nick Fuentes gets about 30-thousand viewers to his show each night. The bulk of it is the same people, as his subscriber count mirrors his view counts, assuming either number is accurate. When he was on YouTube his numbers were briefly higher, but that was due to the phenomenon of the “groyper war” that got him national attention. Again, these numbers are suspect, but let’s just assume his unfettered reach is somewhere around 50-thousand.
Greg Johnson’s site, Counter-Currents, gets about 300-thousand unique visits every month, according to his reporting. The Unz Review probably gets two to three times that traffic, maybe even more. There are dozens of sites catering to outsider politics that get much bigger audiences than Fuentes and he’s the big dog now. When you drop into the typical streamer, the difference becomes amusing. A “popular” streamer, someone that thinks they are a big deal, gets about 10-thousand views.
Getting back to where we started, in new media, the old rule is in reverse. The written word beats the spoken word and the spoken word beats video. Again, the metrics used in these formats are suspect and the comparisons are not equal. Unz and Counter-Currents have a fleet of contributors, while streamers are solo acts or maybe a team operating a single show. Even so, a blogger like Heartiste probably had over 100-thousand readers at his peak, double that of Fuentes.
There’s something else to throw into the mix. There is a difference between viewership, reach and influence. Take a poll of random Americans and more of them will have some familiarity with Nick Fuentes. They may not know anything about Fuentes, other than he is the “Nazi kid on the internet”, but his name will be familiar to them, because they have heard it on their preferred media. Ron Unz, on the other hand, may as well be witness protection. He is an unknown to most everyone.
The fact is, video is still the format with the greatest reach. People are much more likely to share a video clip than copy text from a site and mail it to a friend. They may share a link on their social media platform, but people are much less likely to click the link than watch the video. That’s how Tucker Carlson is a household name, despite the fact that 90% of American adults do not watch his show – ever. With video, you can become wildly famous even though most people never see you.
Now, reach is a different thing than influence. Does Nick Fuentes influence people with his nightly show? In his case, he probably does. Kids are drawn to his act, then passively pick up his politics. Carlson, on the other hand, plays to an established audience that has always existed. He just makes their priors more fun. That said, the typical Counter-Currents reader was a white nationalist before they found that site, which is the main appeal. Greg caters to that existing audience.
The most likely answer with regards to reach and influence is that the written word is the main driver of opinion. Few people reading this will know the name F. Roger Devlin, but his book Sexual Utopia in Power is largely responsible for the entire “man-o-sphere” genre on-line. If we extend that out to the pick-up artists, anti-feminists and others, Devlin has had more influence on men than all of the live streamers combined. His influence will continue into the next generations.
Finally, one last thing about these media platforms. In the legacy media, the newspaper man dreamed of getting a spot-on radio, as the hours were shorter and the pay better than being a beat writer or columnist. The radio guys dreamed of getting a television gig, because the pay was orders of magnitude better. ESPN hoovered up anyone with the least bit of talent for video, because they paid better. Tucker Carlson abandoned writing for television in order to get rich as a personality.
A similar, but smaller scale phenomenon seems to be working in new media. The reason there are so many live streamers is they make money at it. Nick Fuentes makes over $200,000 from his D-live platform. J.F. Gariepy claims to be making six figures with his live stream. These monetization systems like Stream Labs, Entropy and Super Chats sprung up because they can skim a bit from the flow of cash from viewers to these live streamers. Even the little guys make decent money.
In contrast, blogs and websites remain the ghetto of the internet. Three times a year Steve Sailer has to beg for money just to avoid living in a homeless camp. Greg Johnson is constantly looking for money to keep the lights on. These guys have vastly larger audiences than the live streamers, but a fraction of the income. Readers just refuse to support the writers they like, while viewers will take out a mortgage to pay the cable bill, so they can watch their favorite programs.
The reason for this is the way people engage the creator on these platforms. The old saying about the difference between television and radio is that television is a warm medium, while radio is a hot one. A television personality is like a guest at a party, in that they are engaging, but avoid being loud or animated. Radio guys have to be loud and excited in order to grab the listener’s attention. Most people consume audio content while doing other things, so the host has to get their attention.
What this means is the person consuming video is not really there for the content, but rather the social interaction. Live streaming allows the viewer to feel like they are in a party where the streamer is the guest of honor. Television news is loaded with amiable airheads for the same reason. People will welcome a dunce into their home if he is fun at parties, but not invite the smart guy with the unpleasant demeanor. People are willing to pay a lot to be flattered by a good guest in their home.
For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!
This morning… to pick up my comment below … I note that Tim Pool has a video report on You
tube that has been up for about an hour and it has over 45,000 views and over 3,000 comments.
Righthere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIuIcqi9sA
This dachshund video has 18M views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2YBmUkm3Uc
Well yes it does but aren’t you slipping in the puppies vs politics argument. Cat videos score higher as well. Then again there’s the old Best Seller formula which looks not only at total copies sold but also at the pace of those transactions.
“Readers just refuse to support the writers they like, while viewers will take out a mortgage to pay the cable bill, so they can watch their favorite programs.”
True enough but a number of these ‘casters seem to be making a living out of their efforts. Not, of course, that they are YouTube millionaire like Pewdipie or that character in New York who became wealthy by riding his bike into obstacles in the bike lane.
Not that you are wrong in those views that you cite but I just think there are other examples that have a much much greater reach (Joe Rogan is the larger example here.) To get a true idea of reach you have to think what we in magazines were looking at when magazines meant something: “Pass-Along.” This is the number of people a single copy sold get that copy by it being passed along by the person who originally bought. At Penthouse, for example, the pass along was 9. If we sold 5 million copies pass along kicked in.
Something similar is going on with WebCasting: You need to figure in the pass along of podcast+youtubeviews+facebookvies+twitterviews to get a clear idea of the reach of the ‘casters.
Again, I don’t think you are wrong only that you have misunderestimated the numbers and the outlets.
Zman I know it’s probably not your favorite genre but check out the band Disturbed. They’re pretty close to dissident. They got songs that are anti forever war, a great cover of the sound of silence, some frankly Christian themed songs, some stuff that can be considered prepper or even pro civil war.
They may not personally be on this side of the great divide but they’re pretty close. And the comments are interesting on YouTube.
Haven’t been cast into the outer darkness yet, so there is hope normies notice.
It’s sad but you can’t trust “David Draiman.” You can enjoy his powerful voice but he will betray you because he must. Sad but true. This is the world as we find it.
Have you heard his podcast outro music? Z is a GenX Metal Head. Disturbed might be too new for him though. 1994…
Mr. Z man, you have wonderful voice for radio — distinct, sonorous, syllables clearly enunciated. Surely you have thought about doing a real broadcast radio show. If Sean Hannity could work his way into big time radio, so can you.
To warm up for your syndicated radio, why not do some live, audio only webcasts? Same format as a radio talk show — take calls from listeners. Use some Web conferencing software, maybe not calls from cell phones. Zoom works quite well and is free for conferences under 40 minutes long., except the Chinese can spy on you. So try Webex or Microsoft Teams, etc. Your live audio webcasts would of course be recorded and also available as podcasts.
Do you have any local good buddies who play on our team? If so, he could be your call screener.
If the audiocasts do well, you might consider live Web video as well as audio. Zman unmasked!
Off to the big time!
Maybe I’m not understanding here but I see Joe Rogan on Youtube alone with 8 million subscribers and views that regularly go into multiple millions of views. His Elon Musk show of three days ago is already at 9.4 million views. Tim Pool on youtube has 700=800 thousand subscribers and scores hundreds of thousands of views on a daily basis across three channels of content. This is just youtube and doesn’t take into consideration the podcasts stats. Maybe I don’t understand what is being compared here.
Mr. Z, are you going gabless? I didn’t read thru the whole thread, so maybe this question has been asked.
I was born in 1951 so I am without question a “boomer” And yet little – almost nothing – the Zman writes about boomers applies to me. One wonders why I am so different. Or if, just perhaps, at least some of what the Zman writes about boomers is inaccurate. Zman, I am coming to believe that, while much/most of what you write is quite accurate, perhaps your observations about boomers are not.
Only a Boomer would say this.
The problem,ZMan, is that it is true. Almost nothing you write about “Boomers” applies to me. Could it be that some of your observations about boomers are less than universal? Or has your ego, stoked by the adoring legions of your fans, grown so large you can no longer admit even the possibility of error? Perhaps you are in need of an Auriga to whisper “Memento Mori” in your ear.
Bill M., I think it’s a fine thing you exercise input here. Since you contribute material financial support, and I see you are a member whereas under this immediate identity I am not, well please do continue to attempt contributions of all types. But as a GenX I truly want to carve out your eyeballs for your status as a Boomer, of which in private company I absolutely KNOW you relate to. If I was a fly on the wall you would be swatted by now. Next Boomer, we have a SCHEDULE PEOPLE.
And with the sloppiness typical of the Genxer your penultimate sentence is a fuck-up.
Just like you.
So you desire to do me harm solely because of when I was born? Is that a rational way to interact with others?
BTW, you know absolutely nothing about me personally. That you think you do, based solely upon the year of my birth, indicates that you are heavily into magical thinking. Next you will be extolling the virtues of astrology or some astrologer. Drawing conclusions based upon a single point of data is hardly indicative of enlightenment and is GUARANTEED to lead to error.
Ok Boomer, You Are Special.
Reading requires a functioning brain…Tv seeks an empty vessel to fill with Jew bullshit, propaganda and lies.
I once suggested you add some sort of crypto address for donations, you shrugged it off as if it’s some hard work and not worth the effort. Say what you want, but at least these live streamers make the effort to collect their smackers.
These ppl are making a killing with streaming videos. So much for that media narrative of people not having money due to virus.
I guess I’m something of an exception.
I’m a techno-luddite. No television in the house, no radio, and I use a flip phone, but only as a walkie-talkie in case of an emergency. I do like my desktop, though. I dislike video. I don’t like to sit passively and watch, or listen. Even if the speaker is good, I just get fidgetty after a couple minutes. If someone takes the time to write it out I’ll return the effort with my attention. Reading engages my mind, and holds my attention. Watching doesn’t.
JWM
Agree.
You can pack more information. background and nuance into a couple of sentences than ten minutes of video gibbering.
Is anybody else freaked out by the sheer volume that Z is putting out these days? Lockdown has him putting out double the amount per essay. Not complaining, but I need another cup of tea as I meditate over his work…
I’m the hardest working man in dissident show biz! I do usually take Sunday off though.
I’m glad you enjoy what you are doing so much, as I enjoy your posts a lot. But, I do hope that going full speed like you are will not cause “burn out” like it has for so many others.
I sometimes think successful bloggers are those who just survived long term.
Hang in there Z. We don’t always agree, but I always enjoy your stuff. Not bad for a young guy. 🙂
I find that disagreement with Z-man often means for me that the seed planted has not yet had time to germinate.
Z, they’re playing your intro song with a few vibrant, yet surprisingly wholesome, variations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR3uz8rq4ng
Geez Z-man, Stephen Jay Gould is not Jay Gould.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
Off topic field report: Street party in my little red Western town. Two singers, a pianist, a drummer, and a guy who alternated between acoustic guitar and bass. I’d guess over 200 people
“Hold on Loosely” and “Old Time Rock and Roll” got 70 middle aged dancers to block traffic. “You Shook Me” had 50 people doing country line dancing in the street.
The middle aged ladies are gettin’ down. Good times!
No masks. All white except for one Filipina wife. Beautiful community.
The environment in which white women shake their stuff is of enormous significance. The difference between shaking your stuff to Bob Seger, for example, versus some gansta rap is incalculable.
(I am sympathetic with the stern traditionalist who asks, “Why are we allowing white women to ‘shake their stuff’ at all?”)
I suppose, but does any grounded husband want to see his wife shaking her stuff in public? Does a child along the right path want to see mom shaking her stuff in public?
A total side topic. The GOP once again hitches its wagon to a magic negro star, only to find an uppity backhand. He won’t call Trump out on spending that would make LBJ, FDR or any other President look like an ultra-conservative. That’s the real “call out.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/09/republican-candidate-john-james-willing-to-call-out-donald-trump-244989#superComments
Conservative Inc’s sucking of the black cock really is embarrassing and shameful. You can suck the black dick all you want, Matt Walsh, but the left will never accept you!
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2020/05/conservatives-make-fools-of-themselves-over-arbery-shooting/
Had an echo of this a few hours ago, watching ep6 of “Wave… Listen to Me!” an anime about talk radio. The studio manager declared “TV is passive! The viewers take it all in! In radio, make them happy, they call and message. Piss them off, they call and message. We win!”
Isn’t that a factor as to why you pod and not video cast, Z?
Remind you of anyone you might know?
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51zFK%2BgkgNL.jpg
you failed to mention a distinction between at least the audio and written platforms. Unless I’m mistaken the comprehension of the reader or listener appropriately as much greater with the written word then hearing something spoken. I don’t know how this would relate to video. My guess is that video is worst of all since the brain is distracted by processing vision. this would also explain why media people like you barely get by, because you are mostly written word and people don’t like to be made to think. And I at least contribute enough to pay the electric bill on the NightLight in your bathroom. 😃
Perhaps off topic, but the comment about Boomers controlling the media made me think of something Euro friends have mentioned. They always ask why Americans have such a fascination with high school ?
I tell them it’s just old people reminiscing. They’ve talked to other yanks and get the impression high school was the pinnacle of their existence and now life is a daily mundane slog . Just another day closer to the grave.
Agreed.
I never understood the infatuation Boomers have with high school and college. High school was ok, I was a loser but had fun drinking with my buddies. The boomers told me that college would be the best time of my life. People are so mature and friendly in college! Crazy parties, girls, bla bla.
Anyways people are just as shitty in college. College was also okay but it was nothing like what the Boomers or media portray as the “typical” party experience. Mostly just did my homework. Started getting laid which is nice. Most of the party people now work minimum wage jobs.
Life is life. Just make the most out of every stage. Don’t idolize your past. Don’t waste the present hoping for a better future (ie. Retirement). It is what it is.
I hate boomers lol.
High School Never Ends is the Boomer mantra. College, for those few Boomers that went – many did not.
Even your family effs with you.
Fiance’s mom: Are we SURE we want to move to the south? *I* just have nothing in common with these racists. (Upon reading a boilerplate goodwhite gun violence article.)
Thankfully, I have been somewhat successful in denormifying my woman. “Uh, ma, I’m pretty sure not everybody in the south is racist. Also, aren’t you kind of racist?”
I would have been a little more aggressive, but it’s good she said something.
Way to go man! Hopefully she’s able to find like-minded friends. It’s hard to keep a woman on the wagon if her friends aren’t.
are you bringing your mother in law with you when you move south?
any reason she can’t / won’t stay up north?
She’s not living with us, but there’s a possibility she’ll want to follow her daughter into Dixie after empty nest syndrome sets in.
We’ll stick her in a very blue state if we must. I love her, but I don’t like her. Addicted to NPR. One of the nurse heroes.
The only important question is if she will babysit the young ones. So long as she doesn’t attempt to impose her shitlib values.
Video products are entertainment and can derive income in proportion to the audience it draws as entertainment. A written blog is not entertainment so it has to have a different value proposition. Steve Sailer is constantly begging for money because he has no idea what the value proposition for his writing is supposed to be, which is ironic because his background is in marketing. I don’t know that Steve Sailer has ever asked himself the fundamental question of why his readers should pay him for his writing?
The moral of the Steve Sailer story is that if you are going to write a blog that deals with politics, even dissident politics, you have to engage with the political process. If you don’t, the blog ultimately becomes an old man yelling at clouds. Or in Steve Sailer’s case more like the Seinfeld of blogs, where you’re just making pithy comments about observations. I like some of Sailer’s writing but if he got hit by a bus tomorrow not a single thing in the world would change.
I always thought that Red State had the right formula with a front page to house content of interest to a national audience, then links to sub-pages with content of interest at a state or local level. Unfortunately, they blew it when they went all Never Trump. I have not been back since.
The Red State formula could have a lot of power in the dissident right community. Our numbers are too small to have a meaningful impact on matters of national interest, but we could have a lot of influence on local and state matters. For example, somebody needs to hold that crazy judge in Dallas accountable for jailing the hairdresser for the crime of working. He’s up for election this year. Similarly, somebody needs to make sure that the DA assigned to the Arbery shooting case in Georgia will be held accountable if the McMichaels are railroaded. We can generate significant pressure on a local level (while remaining anonymous) for issues like this. We just don’t have a structure in place to do so. The left does, which is why they always win.
There are more subtleties. The medium at least affects the message.
A written piece can embed links (including to video!) and citations, etc. But the words are flat so don’t have the metadata audio does.
A Podcast can shade things with expression (who is the modern Rich Little?). No one will type a citation.
Video can show things at remote locations. Strange, but many video channels are just the talking head, and not even information in the background.
Nor can you transpose. A very good blog has become mediocre as the author has taken to video. The videos aren’t as good even now since the thoughts can’t be coordinated as carefully, even though he has broken the habit for the most part of welcoming new people or saying to ban them or complaining about them in the comments.
You can skip blog articles, but a podcast/vid is much harder especially when there is a long “hello” section, and the various disjoint business sections are random.
There is still much to subvert via memes and political cartooning.
OT –
I’ve noticed a trend toward dudes getting bigger legs & butt. No homo, lol. Not referring to the natural aging process but to young guys, not fat, having wide hips and big butts. Of course hips come in all shapes and sizes but the narrow hipped man seems to be rare…this could something that’s been around for awhile or forever but it hasn’t been part of my paradigm. Curious what the older crowd has observed.
If it is a newer thing I’m curious what’s causing men’s hips to get wider.
They all look like bowling pins to me. I don’t know what caused it. No upper body exertion? They look like the couldn’t break a lugnut loose even if they knew what a lugnut was. Those tight pants don’t help, either.
Birth control residue, estrogen, and other chemicals in the water supply. Plenty of studies have shown the disturbing level of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of major cities and suburbs. Rural guys on wells are, of course, safer.
Who knows, this contamination might be at least partly responsible for the trans madness:
https://www.livescience.com/20532-birth-control-water-pollution.html
The birth control pill may be the closest thing to a cyanide capsule that western civilization has ever taken.
FMen – I recall Heartiste had a thing about birth control in the water masculinizing women and feminizing men…it’s an interesting thought. I’ll have to re-visit…
I think everyone in this society, even critical guys, under-estimate the effect that pharmaceuticals have had on our society. Speaking as a true Millennial I can say that pretty much every woman I dated before my current girlfriend were on multiple pills. Birth control is a given, but “Anti-Anxiety pills” are about as prevalent. I definitely think it has a major effect on personality, and is wreaking havoc on society as a whole.
I am convinced that the problem is fundamentally that women are being pushed into places that do not align with their natural inclinations (even if they’ve denied those inclinations to themselves), and so pills are then pushed on them to ‘fix’ this.
They just don’t skip leg day.
I have known for decades that I am really out of step with “modern society”. After all, I would rather read a book than endure a podcast. I would much rather read today’s post by Z than listen to him. I just can read so much faster than people talk. And if I miss something I can go back and study it.
As an example, since I don’t associate with idiots any more than I have to I just don’t know any Boomers that are afraid of the mild cold causing Corona. None. Hell, I have a letter from my doctor on my desk stating that I can’t wear a mask due to a heart condition. I don’t want anyone to “help me”.
And TV in general is horrible. Just plain horrible. There is great wisdom in Z’s observations on media. But it really is a black pill for me.
I know a few but, like you, I don’t associate with them. I’ve never associated with the type in any meaningful way. At least not for any length of time. It doesn’t take long for the discerning to figure out who the Karens and the Cucks are, even when they’re trying to hide that aspect of their natures. It always comes out sooner or later.
Common media kind of requires people with things in common .
The industrial media period (30’s to maybe 95) seems like a long time but it was artificial even than its demise pushed along by immigration.
My take is the US is a B.S country held together by inertia so no reason to pretend we have a common culture.
“People will welcome a dunce into their home if he is fun at parties, but not invite the smart guy with the unpleasant demeanor.”
Maybe the the smart guy isn’t so smart if he acts all the time like his dog just died. No one really likes downer people. Seriously they don’t. Look you don’t need to be a Davey Downer to talk about important issues or come off like a pretentious gas bag. Guys like Peterson,Tucker and Fuentes get this at some level.
Carlson has to watch what he says because of who he works for. But he comes very close. Any farther he’d be a broke ass commentator on Unz. In general he does a better job at reaching Normies than our side who only preach to the converted.
“Carlson has to watch what he says because of who he works for. But he comes very close. Any farther he’d be a broke ass commentator on Unz. In general he does a better job at reaching Normies than our side who only preach to the converted.”
Spot on. I used to consider Carlson a geeky cuckservative, in no small part because he was, but what a spectacular observer and voice he has become. He reaches Normies because he is a Normie, albeit one who started to notice. He eventually will be booted by the Neocons at Fox, but he has done more to reach clueless Goodwhites in a few years than we were able to do in a generation. Carlson is the only reason to watch Fox, but given he has not been banned yet from YouTube, even that cesspit can be avoided.
OT:
Elon “It’s Just the Flu Bro” Musk is suing Alameda County and threatening to move Tesla out of California:
“This Is The Final Straw”: Elon Musk Melts Down, Says He’s Suing Alameda County & Moving Tesla Out Of California
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/final-straw-elon-musk-says-hes-suing-alameda-county-moving-tesla-texas-or-nevada
This Musk fella might be an alright dude after all…
Yep. I’ve noted this before as well. Although I would slightly modify that statement to read “anything touted as medical,” etc. Who do people think were/are the ‘prime movers’ behind legalization of “medical marijuana” in “ultra-conservative” states like Oklahoma? The youth? I’ll take “Haight-Ashbury Rejects” for a thousand, Alex.
I haven’t watched TV in over a decade now, and I don’t miss it. However, I occasionally stay at a friend’s house when visiting the big city and cannot avoid some expose to regular television programming. As a result, I have to admit that I enjoy watching the local weather broadcasts. Most of these weather-casters are women who embody wholesome hotness and sound normal to boot. Perhaps there is still hope for the species.
All of this shows that media conglomerates are vastly net-negative. All their self-serving arglebargle about fact-checking, institutional integrity and deep concerns about echo chambers vs. the “marketplace of ideas” doesn’t justify letting less than a dozen mega-corps exercise the worldwide influence they do – all while raking in buckets of shekels to pour into the government-media-academia complex & Woke Capital social engineering.
A legitimate government would trust-bust legacy media companies like AT&T, Disney, Comcast, Fox, CBS and Viacom and the Google-YouTube/Faceberg complex on the online-side.
Given our lack of legitimate government, a grassroots’ media “slow-cleanse” means you stop supporting these companies and platforms.
I’d rather send shekels to my favorite “echo chambers” than spending that money of “Frozen IV – The Roastie Years.”
You know the rest – IRL communities, real social interaction, keep as much of our money and effort in-house as we can and work as hard at unplugging and red-pilling Our Guys as Shlomo does at wrecking us.
If we could get one win vs. the System, I’d take an “internet bill of rights.” I doubt there’s enough support left for genuine free speech and related rights in the USA to pull it off, though.
If Our Guys didn’t suffer from censorship, financial deplatforming as well as active misinformation and COINTEL ops, it would be possible to make real cultural and social progress in our lifetimes and it would make it possible for more quality content creators to make a “living wage.”
You nailed it with, “real social interaction.”
What’s the one thing that the authorities seem to be terrified of permitting during this entire demented episode?
Real social interaction by shutting down places like restaurants, bars, churches, community centers, and trying to enforce this lunatic, “social distancing,” at the places that are open.
Why is that? Why are they so dead set against the man in the street having a friendly chat with Joe Sixpack?
This interview with the author Lionel Shriver touches on similar themes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YYI7nPy-0
Yes, she sounds like a shitlib, but her attitude about WuFlu is quite based.
Lionel Shriver writes for the Guardian and, yes, she is a card-carrying shitlib in most things.
Thanks for the link! She had an interesting interview with Peter Whittle (“So What You’re Saying Is”) a couple months ago – regarding SJWs and identity politics, in 2 parts. She’s equal parts hilarious and cantankerous. She’s coming around, slowly but surely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS33UnCDhow
As you’ve alluded Z-Man, that discretionary super-chat stuff is going away with 30% to 50% unemployment. And no, there will not be UBI for everyone. As everyone knows, White people, particularly White men, are not eligible. Even then, 2K a month is not enough to live on for most people. Its $24,000 a year, which is poverty level in most places. THAT income means no car, no house, nothing but a crummy apartment in the vibrant part of town and a few meager possessions. No super chat spending there.
It also means no streaming also, which means streaming will have to get a lot more expensive and a lot more anti-White to appeal to the few remaining upper class Karens who virtue signal and to wealthy non White lesbians.
Our content creators need to get off the video teat since at any rate, President Harris or Abrams will not tolerate them anyway. And as above not financially sustainable for their supporters.
A single can live on $24k a year and have a car as long as you don’t live in Bug territory.
In a reasonably unplugged based community of like-minded anti-Bugs, you could get by well on that.
For some napkin-math on the Amish for instance, they live well on a household income of between $50-$80k with a working husband, stay-at-home-mom and 8+ kids.
http://www.city-data.com/income/income-Lancaster-Pennsylvania.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/money-secrets-of-the-amish-2013-4?op=1
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-income-of-the-average-household-within-the-Amish-community?share=1
Are you willing to forgo most of the modernist offers like running water, electricity, Internet, cars ?
Didn’t think so.
Solutions like “live like the Amish. and breed’ are silly.
That said if big if you can find an income and avoid the druggies, not living in bug territory is cheaper.
Are you saying ruralites in America live without internet, cars, running water or electricity? Rent in these communities is 1/2 what it is in urban areas if not less. A beater car costs $2k tops – less if you’re good at fixing them. Insurance < $50 a month. Gas is your highest expense.
Your point isn't even superficially valid.
"Don't breed" isn't an option and staying plugged into the system as an atomized individual means nothing changes.
If you have a better strategy, let's hear it.
I hate the standard yuppie contention that bringing a child into the world is somehow an act of cruelty. Like they’re morally superior to you just because they’re eschewing a family.
Spare me your pussified self-exhonoration from your sacred duty (Unless you’re an illegal and this is your sixth anchor baby — then you definitely shouldn’t have another.). Why wouldn’t I want to live amidst even greater love and variation?
No one, yuppie or any other variety of person, says that “bringing a child into the world is somehow an act of cruelty.” But many understand that having children should not be a feel-good act of self-indulgence. It has social consequences, for good and ill, and both need to be taken into account.
Children are little miracles, but they can do the devil’s work (through no fault of their own) if they are brought into an overcrowded, overpopulated world, with no thought of the big picture. True, lots of pro-natalists have given up on society and civilization; for them children are the only refuge. But once you completely write off society, there is no refuge.
GD, Whites aren’t overpopulating, Browns are.
The answer to that isn’t for Whites to stop reproducing. We’re the only race that on a group level really gives a damn about population, the environment or the future of “mankind” in any meaningful sense.
More Us, Less Others.
Which natalists have given up on “society and civilization?”
Liberalism is not the end-all-be-all definition of either society or civilization. I’m saying give up on liberalism, not society or civilization on the whole. Folkish society is still society and it doesn’t have to be primitive or reactionary despite the superficial assumptions a lot of guys make.
I don’t understand “More Us, Less Others.” Are the browns and blacks going to throttle down their reproductive rates because they see whites adding to their own? Few of them will care or even realize it’s happening. These natalist bidding wars simply fuel an ever-exploding world population. That’s bad, even if a slightly larger percentage are whites.
You are right. The insane growth of non-white groups is most to be feared. “The population in Africa is rapidly expanding, and by 2060 the region will hold an estimated 2.8 billion people,” says the World Bank. So why not concentrate efforts on reducing propagation where it is most needed? We should offer almost limitless aid for birth control and zero for health care that enables the madcap hyper-reproduction.
“Liberalism is not the end-all-be-all definition of either society or civilization.” Of course not. “I’m saying give up on liberalism, not society or civilization on the whole.” Again, I agree. Those who see procreation as the only light shining in abysmal darkness have (in many cases) lost touch with ideals of civilization.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Exile. I appreciate your continuing contributions to this forum.
Oh, you’d be surprised how many say just those words about cruelty to bring a child into this world. Many an excuse to visit planned parenthood is given by this statement. It’s not the real reason, of course, but it’s the one they tell themselves to give them a rationalization for killing a child.
You can toss in Obama’s statement that be didn’t want his daughter “punished” by having a child. Ghoulish.
You can come back and try your Praeger U trad con “kids” lecture sometime after the marriage system is fixed. It might make sense than.
Now I don’t think its a moral choice one way or another save for people who are unfit to raise children either from biology or behavior, in which case the best choice is to not have kids.
Outside of various religions I do not practice is no sacred duty to have children. In the secular world where I live its entire optional
I’m secular, too. But if something in this world is sacred, reproduction’s it. You don’t need marriage to make it work.
We will have to agree to disagree about reproduction.
In any case it kind of requires a decent income and a decent woman. Neither of which I have.
However if the USG goes full social credit like I think it might, 2k a month +2k per kid looks pretty good to me. I’ll go back to the deep West where I was raised, hunt up a wife and some extra work and maybe do that.
IMO things will change either after a collapse or by a bugaloo you win not by by having more children though admittedly future children might speed up either of those.
AB, unless the collapse or bugaloo happens a lot faster than I expect, we’re going to need children to lift our new flags.
Tomorrow belongs to someone else if we don’t have kids, regardless of what our politics are.
abprosper:
Interesting how different individuals presumably of significant like-mindedness can read the same comment (Exile’s) and interpret it in completely different ways. Only Exile knows precisely what he intended by giving the example of the Amish, but I personally didn’t take it that he meant ‘forgo running water, electricity, internet, cars,’ or necessarily any combination thereof.
“Live like the Amish and breed.” Ha, ha. You’re funny.
I lived and worked around, or near (more or less), “bug territory” for thirty years before deciding to return home to my roots and kith and kin. Early in my adulthood I didn’t think I’d ever come back home, but decades of exposure to and interaction with the bug people changed my mind over time.
And BTW, it isn’t just cheaper to live among the non-bug people; another benefit (that a man can’t place a value on, as I’ve said many times before) is peace of mind. Indeed, I was one of the first to invite Oklahoma’s public school teachers to follow their (ignorant) hearts’ desires and pick up and leave the state a couple of years ago when they collectively ‘rose up’ in demand of higher pay, threatening to move to ‘greener pastures’ if their demands weren’t met. They were demanding average teacher salaries several thousand dollars in excess of the median household income in Oklahoma (nuts!), and were idiotically touting Oklahoma’s 49th ranking at the time as meaningful in and of itself (in other words, failing to take into account dozens of variables that factor(ed) into that ranking – median household income, cost of living index, and so on and so forth).
But anyway, I’ll take the (few) druggies in non-bug territory over the alternative territory any day of the week and twice on Sundays. But that’s just me. To each his own, I guess.
TM, you’re on target. I cited the Amish as an extreme example income-wise and a good group to harvest some strategies from, not a recommendation to imitate 100% of their lifestyle.
AB, people have kids and breed dogs. Referring to having kids as “breeding” sounds kinda odd, TBH.
Old habit. Sorry. I was a bit Anti Natal as a youngster.
I’m not that now but I’m highly introverted and to be honest I have essentially no interest in marriage or children, haven’t in years.
Hell I don’t even want a girlfriend as it fails costs benefit analysis. Its literally not worth the effort in time or money.
Well, it’s all a matter of one’s priorities coupled with his worldview, I suppose. Quite to the contrary of your assertions, I for one have found that it has been worth every penny and every effort expended (and then some) to have married early and raised a large family. And, no, I have never given up owning property, driving motorized vehicles, having running water and toilets that flush, or anything of the sort.
Good for you. How old are you though? This was an easy road for Boomers even though they had a low TFR (selfish I guess) , somewhat harder for Gen X and fairly difficult for Gen Y.
Again different strokes. I’m a bit odd in that I have some elements in common with the Malthusian Greens of the 80’s and 90’s before big money shut down the anti immigration factions.
I don’t think the Earth can sustain more than a billion or two if we are wise thorough I want to see the European defended peoples to be at least a 25% of that as we have been historically.
Just because you don’t want kids and are a socially inept outcast, doesn’t mean you should encourage other whites to be the same way.
Who says I am doing that? I’m a live and let live kind of guy.
Also in my defense while my social skills could always use a bit of work most of them including “game” are decent.
I don’t get much use of them or want to use them so I suppose “outcast” is true enough.
That said while saving the White race is a noble goal as Keynes was famous for saying “In the long run we are all dead.” and that includes races, faiths and everything else.
Again this is a philosophical difference. I don’t see the universe as purposeful at any level that matters to a human or humans in general to be special.
We are all dust sooner than later.
Society itself requires a sort of willing suspension of disbelief and more than a little buy in.
Most people are bought in to society to a degree or a dissident one and there is nothing wrong with that.
I wouldn’t tell someone to opt out or buy out unless they would be better off for it.
Still to my way of thinking, the sane philosophy to live in the world is a mix of Stoicism and Buddhism.
The less you want , the less attachments, the more stoic the better off you’ll be.
The ideal man is calm, fearless of death and detached from all desire. Spartan Samurai.
This absolutely applies to the mating market, what you do not want or desire will not burden you terribly.
This attitude would end the thirst, women chasing , porn and a host of other ills and in time the behavior of women would’ve thus shifting the cost benefit analysis since both sexes would be more desirable to the other.
And no I don’t meet the ideal, few do.
The only option the elite have is I suppose to replace the population with others but as they’ve noticed the escalates failure quickly. Modernity is a null state and I am far from sure it can be outbred on any scale and any of it retained.
In case anyone brings up MGTOW , my key problem with it is the “movement” is one of attachment. Your identity as a MGTOW is essentially a feminist and materialist one.
The only way out of that trap is what MGTOW call Monk Mode which doesn’t suit most people.
This is also why I eschew racism as an identity. It ties a persons identity to an others actions and existence.
The opposite of Love is indifference. Meh not Hate.
I had a much longer post that just reappeared ,but I’ll still sum up.
Not wanting to be part of something badly broken =/= socially inept. As I noted above social skills including game are decent.
I just stopped caring.
The Amish do not save money by eschewing running water and electricity, which are cheap. It’s a lifestyle choice. They save money by not investing in capital equipment, but that too is a lifestyle choice. They live like any farmer in 1900 would live.
The change in media over the last 10 years has been fantastic. Old boomers are hard wired for cable news because their brains are too rotted out for something different. Any thinking person says goodbye to televised news at some point. The establishment can’t stand this. The establishment’s ideal was Walter Cronkite, an avid socialist who would sail his yacht in the Atlantic in-between “telling it like it is.” They can’t stand that information is now out of the silos. The format doesn’t matter much, it’s the direct to consumer firehose without the middle man that upsets them. One day we’ll all need VPNs as they’ll unmask themselves, throwing the muh-Constitution people aside, and locking down the internet like the Chinese. They can’t have people getting a clue. They need people to go from Kindergarten to the grave merely as info-c um receptacles for the establishment, with the next Ellen Degenerate playing the Walter Cronkite role. Every blog, no matter how small, plays a role.
Old boomers are hard wired for cable news because their brains are too rotted out for something different.
Sure, because younger generations *definitely* aren’t in thrall to popular media.
It’s depressing to see so many of today’s comments mired in meaningless, moronic generational pigeon-holing with about as much validity as astrology.
Ouch! Boomer here. JR paints with a broad brush, but not totally without merit. As as you’ve noted, what Boomers are guilty of, I suspect follow-on generations will be guilty of themselves when they reach our age.
I’m an impressionist like Van Gogh. And now that I’m involuntarily sequestered, I drink like him. I still shower though.
At least you have both ears. I think.
Video’s tendency to reduce people into impulsive children lacking self control is very real. It turns too many people into Ahmaud Arberys at the exact moment in history we should be learning impulse control. Video has infantilized people at the same time as it has prevented them from responding to events coherently “IRL”. That is a remarkable ability: to both excite and pacify people at the same time.
There’s a reason the first cracks in society coincided with the rise of TV. There’s also a reason the tech totalitarians refuse to give their own kids access to the same products they push on the rest of us – they know something we don’t.
The mentally ill libertarian (I know that’s a redundant phrase) would resist any restrictions on video as a medium, but the smart conservative would probably advocate for limiting its proliferation as they would other vices. It doesn’t have to be banned, but it at least shouldn’t be promoted.
Except for DVDs, I’ve tried to cut video out of my life as much as possible. No social media, no TV, no Netflix, none of that. When these were a bigger part of my day I noticed that my ability to read had declined precipitously: I would get too bored with a book, put it down, and idly return to my phone. Same with blog posts: my eyes would glaze over halfway through, I’d lose interest, and I’d turn to some BS clips and memes on twitter. After I cut these out by getting rid of my TV hookup (I kept only the DVD player for movies) and installing browser plugins to block social media sites and videos, my attention span gradually improved again. My stress also went way down.
One terrifying problem we have yet to confront is that all white children are being raised by their phones – cheap video portals that they are – these days, which means that our own children are now little better than impulsive Africans.
Video and social media definitely seem to be mixed blessings, but on the other hand I wonder if they have inadvertently done more to grow the dissident right (in the broadest sense of that term to mean anyone dissatisfied with leftist or libertarian narratives) than any one figure, event, or organized movement. The ubiquity of smartphone video shared peer-to-peer on social media has made it really, really easy to “notice” things we formerly were never allowed to notice through the carefully curated MSM.
Even though the McMichaels will probably be railroaded, the smartphone video (and emerging security camera videos) quickly reveal another black tragically but unsurprisingly suffering the consequences of his own lack of impulse control. We saw the same thing in 2014 with the fall of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie, with blacks increasingly turning against police body cams (because they’ve only been justifying the cops’ reactions), and with countless other videos or social media video analysis that have ruined official narratives.
Without lightning-fast social media dissection, for example, it probably would have been impossible to quickly reveal ABC’s fraudulent “Syria bombing” video as just some stock footage from Kentucky. Their quick exposure only furthered distrust in MSM and made it more obvious that they are brazen liars worthy of the guillotine. This example makes me shudder to think what would have happened if it was still 1998 – would anyone have found out and called ABC out on it? Maybe there would have been a buried “letter to the editor” in some Kentucky newspaper from an archivist at UK, but that’s about it. This also makes me wonder how many pre-smartphone narratives from 1945 to 2008 were fraudulent: I now assume most of them were distorted in some way, if not fabricated outright.
Since smartphone-enabled video sharing and social media has made it way too easy for people to “notice” when official narratives contradict their own observations, the left is terrified and it’s not surprising their religion has grown more ferocious as a result. The left has never had a god, and while they’ve always had a useful devil (white people), they’ve also always had the one other ingredient all religions have and need: just enough mysticism and sense of the indeterminate supernatural to serve as the ideological sheen and buffer between observable reality and faith.
History has shown that whenever that sheen/buffer falls, the religion collapses. Truth, no matter if it’s suppressed for decades or even centuries, always wins eventually. The left is terrified that social media and the internet might be eating away at the MSM and establishment institutional mysticism that served as the ideological buffer for leftism, that served as a suspension device just thick enough to separate reality from theology. “Noticing” is gradually eating away at that buffer such that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for normies to square diversity, inclusion, and equity with what happens to normies and their friends personally every day. Unlike Islam, leftism is losing the buffer of the supernatural, and the social upheaval when video-enabled “noticing” reaches a critical mass is going to be historical. As Z likes to say, the left may have a lot of things we’ll never have, but we have the one thing they’ll never have: the truth. And truth always wins.
FTN has digested the Arbery situation very accurately: I still think the McMichaels will be sacrificed to keep the peace but the MSM narrative would probably never have cracked if not for the presence of video, cameras, and phones everywhere:
https://therightstuff.biz/2020/05/09/ftn-311-gettin-the-old-noggin-joggin/
The short of it, most people would rather be entertained than informed. They would rather follow than lead, be supported than challenged, agreeable than troublesome, accepted than ostracized.
True enough. But one has to accept the truth. It means that our guys have to try harder to be entertaining–and, as you say, to take the lead.
As somebody said above, the production values of a lot of our sides’ stuff is so bad. If we could combine the solid intellectual content with a bit of narrative polish and some snap in the pacing and production values, it would be dynamite.
Maybe there’s an element of laziness too. Reading is not passive, afterall. It takes effort.
I think one of the biggest problems for “big think”-type blogs is a kind of analysis paralysis. For one thing, everyone who has ever written a blog post has had the experience of laying out what you think is an airtight case for X, with a throwaway remark in there about Y… and then getting a whole bunch of comments about nothing but Y. It encourages pedantry from both writers and commenters.
The other, more insidious form is the knowledge that it has all been said before. It’s similar to real academic work – you just *know* that there’s a document in an archive somewhere titled “Why your precious thesis is wrong, volume 1.” If you read all the stuff you really need to read in order to write something, you’ll never write anything… but if you don’t, you’re either trying to re-invent the wheel, or you spend a zillion hours wrestling with a problem some churchman knocked out back in the 1400s. (Which, again encourages pedantry – “Haven’t you read Tomasso Campanella in the original?”). Etc.
I find the “gruggist” movement on Twitter to be somewhat encouraging: Grug says, our guys good, their guys bad, that sort of thing.
It’s a humorous way of reminding you to take your own side. But one wonders if the irony in which it’s packaged will rot away the core message.
Severian, haven’t you got some new thing like “practical life lessons drawn from the classics”? Where can we find that?
The danger of being in a vanguard has always been getting too far out in front and/or disappearing up your own asshole.
There is a place for a couple of goys talking Hediegger between two lampshades. Or at least I can remember when there was.
But having ten thousand ever-ready to point and yell Jew! is where the meta meets the mass in politics.
It’s here, thanks for asking. But it really is just talking about Marcus Aurelius and suchlike.
For content, either in video, podcasts or written, I still marvel at how things have changed. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, I subscribed to Chronicles (flagship paleoconservative magazine) and Sam Francis’ newsletter. Amren also put out a newsletter. There was also a monthly newspaper called “Middle American News”, which was borne out of the Reform Party movement. It featured writers such as Charley Reese, Joe Sobran, Francis, Paul Craig Roberts, maybe Derb, although I can’t remember. The paper covered in detail how members of Congress voted on various bills, which is what a newspaper should do. The circulation of these publications was minuscule, although some of the writers (Sobran, Reese) were syndicated and appeared in some mainstream newspapers.
Later on online sources for our side popped up, like Vdare, and some immigration sites like numbersUSA, which changed things significantly. When videos and podcasts appeared, along with smartphones to play them, and the ease of sharing the content, it was like the sun rising. A whole new ballgame now.
For the people in charge, the growth and spread of dissident content is an enormous problem, like trying to contain a virus. “Lockdown” is a ubiquitous word these days, and I’m sure it’ll be increasingly used for locking down internet content. We need to consider this a race to inform as many of our friends and family as possible while we still can before the hammer falls. Forget about the hard-core leftists. They won’t change. Concentrate on the Rush/Hannity patriotic folks. They’re much easier to red-pill.
I advocate what you might call the “one step” approach: try to get people to take one step to the right from where they currently are. Some people just arent ready for the hardest of the hard-right stuff, but you can still keep them moving down “redpill road.”
And I totally agree that you should never waste time with the “unredpillable” hardcore leftists. Total waste of time, and will get your social media accounts nuked. Better, as Wolf said, to focus on the already conservative, libertarian, or right-curious types.
Twitter and comments section protip: try to get one of the early comments on the big center-right accounts. Just drop in a few seeds of /our/ thing without being too hardcore.
“Our Thing” does a terrible job at outreaching to Rush and Hannity peeps in general. There is no one go to site or even a e-booklet that explains things.
If “our thing” was a church it would be populated by parishioners who don’t talk to walk-ins, have no pamphlets describing their church or what it is about. It would a church without a bible or even a creed.
That said,it would be nice if “Our Thing” had the equivalent of Paine’s “Common Sense” but we don’t.
Revolutions require negative identity so strong that something like “Common Sense” catches fire. Did Paine’s readers love America (yet-to-be defined) enough to risk the noose, or was “Common Sense” effective propaganda because they hated the Brits enough?
Rush & Hannity are popular because they’re approved opposition permitted their corner of Overton space. Most of their listeners aren’t willing to test those fences yet. The kabuki theater continues to satisfy what little itch for subversion they have. They have to hate the system more first. They’re too comfortable right now.
We can’t force that. Historically times like this are when dissidents build infrastructure and hash out their internal struggles. We lack a common “negative” sense of a common enemy, much less a common “positive” agenda (which comes later).
Times like this (blogging to victory) was 20 years ago.
Revolutions occur beause people think it’s possible to win.
You have given up but won’t admit it so you post comments on sites and content yourself with these victories.
Try reading some of my past comments before you decide I’ve “given up,” noob.
Trump is a Boomer but Fauci and I are the products of people who didn’t go to war. So, technically this shutdown was caused by a pre-Boomer and implemented by a Boomer. All that said, I don’t think the Boomer public takes this thing nearly so seriously as the young based on a non-scientific, non-peer reviewed tabulation of mask wearers in an area which, as a whole, doesn’t take this thing seriously. It looks like about half the people at Kroger and Wal-Mart are wearing masks and most of those are Gen-somethings.
I saw a little girl try to SJW with chalk in front of mommy’s hospital the other day. She wrote “A hoer works here!”
If the boomers still control the culture then the boomers are the ones have created ‘binary’ politics as you pointed out in a previous blog. Not only that, they created a culture of feminized men and butch women, the cucks and the Karens. Gen Xers were right along there with them as they refused to grow up and even enabled their kids, millennials, to become who they are today – afraid of their own shadows. Helicopter parenting, sharing culture, etc., all contributed to it. Look at Facebook. Kids don’t use it but their parents do. Eventually Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat will be taken over by Gen Xers forcing the kids to constantly look for new sites like Tik Tok to communicate on. Kids, however, would rather be YouTube stars than television stars today. My 15 year old daughter only mentions her favorite YouTubers and never television or movie stars.
In contrast to the MSM and Hollywood not many members of of the Tribe are popular youtubers, harder for them to rig the game and control who gets to be popular, NICE
Fellowship and spectacle, two things we are hard wired for. They fill the room and hold our attention.
A lecture or radio can open doors and paint a landscape. They awaken the intellect but are not able to set deep roots of comprehension.
Text, paper & pencil and quiet focus are a necessity to master subject matter beyond the superficial. Writing forces us to focus even more and to clarify and to pare things down into what we truly think.
All of these seem woven together within our social fabric, from our passive intake of spectacles that draw our attention to the text which in the right hands can give it a thoughtful evaluation.
When one of them becomes corrupted it spreads everywhere.
Spectacle was once High Mass, Sophocles, Verdi, Shakes and John Ford flicks. It’s now the Kardashians, savages aping to primitive beats, retards playing pro sports and so much more mindless time consuming drivel that most people never bother to tax a few brain cells and reflect upon things of importance for even a moment or two.
Most of those who do reflect have been so bamboozled that they are bounded by a kosher corral from which many will never break free.
The great service Zman and others who are leaving a written record, is the creation of an archive for future generations. Our descendants will have a record showing not everyone in our age had scurried down the wonderland rabbit hole.
Your comment about paper & pencil are why I am totally against any sort of electronic aid for students until about 15 or 16 years of age.
Banging away on a keyboard or tapping a screen simply does not develop the kind of rigorous intuition that one needs to truly understand writing, math, or any technical subject from their fundamentals to their most esoteric niches.
It is more than clear that writing and hand work develops neural pathways that the mindless tapping does not.
Hey, I support you. And I don’t give money to any of the video people. I also own and have read that Devlin book. But I can see your problem for print people because I know I’m weird. Who knows what the future holds because, God knows, not one of us would have predicted what’s going on right now two months again
It’s a bit creepy to see what can happen based on something as silly as this “pandemic”. What happens when things get REAL? It seems to me that we are no longer a serious nation.
Vox Day’s “Darkstreams” appear well-attended given the chat activity and subscriber numbers in the tens of thousands. Not millions, granted.
Which may contradict but not invite the smart guy with the unpleasant demeanor. Or for that matter Ann Coulter. Just an observation.
What you fail to understand is that many subscribers are there for the hate viewing and some actually pay to troll old Teddy Spaghetti. Also reference the “assuming either number is accurate” when Z is talking about Nick Fuentes. This is you, isn’t it Ted? Has to burn when Z uses Nick Fuentes as an example and not The One That Sits on The Throne Gay & Cringe.
Not a defender and certainly not the man himself. Somebody who would routinely tune into a stream they hate consistently over years simply to spew vitriol and troll has clinical psychological problems. Is that you, John Wayne?
Vox is a contender. Sigmas can be bristly around each other, but you are on the same side of the divide.
“ Since Boomers are now deeply involved in the health care system, anything medical is going to be of utmost importance to everyone. It is why nurses are now heroes.”
I suppose that’s true. But I would argue it’s about the roles and new women power more than simply boomers. All this has more the feel of relentless female nagging and total commitment to risk aversion.
Jay, I get that sense as well but I would add that for a lot of the strong independent womyn in my circles the risk aversion is largely limited to that of social status risk.
Real risk has been removed from their lives. The real aversion is to (negative) consequences; to having responsibility for any poor outcomes of their decisions thrust upon them. They have the authority but loathe the responsibility.
This is what dovetails with boomer fragility and death fears to form the “I’m with her” wokescold coalition of the gynocracy.
One medium that warrants a mention is Twitter. It has no financial aspect, but is an absolute engine of redpilling.
I thought I was already pretty right-woke before I got on Twitter, but it took me to places I’d never imagined.
Even after the 2016 election, incessant bannings, throttling/shadowbanning, et cetera, it’s still a major forum for doing our thing. Being good at Twitter is a very special and unique type of talent, and some of our guys have got the knack.
“If the Boomers were twenty years younger, the virus would rate a few mentions in the New York Times science section.”
This is a very astute observation. I came to the same conclusion about a month ago. For some reason leftist millennials favor continuing the shutdowns as well. Ironically, I work with boomers and everyone of them wants to end these shutdowns immediately.
Many of them have this fantasy that their student loans will be forgiven.
Although I’m not the target demographic, I have some student loans I took out in my 40s during my “professional student” phase. Finally got a MS in Spanish at age 54 that collects dust 😀 I wouldn’t turn down a $30K write down of my debt. To all appearances, there is infinite free money for everybody so you might as well take your helping until the system completely is exhausted.
A lot of Leftist millennials are not doing all that well in life. Heck, even the ones that are doing fairly well are extremely bitter about the boomers’ control of the culture and economy.
I keep in touch with a Leftish Xennial who was a successful mid-level engineer that has moved to urban planning. He has a paid-off condo, career, and stable marriage. Of course, he believes Canada is superior to the US in every possible way and visits America’s Hat as much as possible.
Anyway, his comment on this whole situation, especially with regard to the economic fallout was:
“I just want to see it all burn down.”
Wow.
FWIW a lot of us Gen X want it to burn too. Many of us got screwed too though not as much as Gen Y.
Millennials you see have 67% less in terms of real wealth than the Boomer’s did at the same age.
Its no wonder the Left leaning ones are Socialists . They got all the rungs of the ladder sawed out from under them and the people with saws prating about how lazy and useless they were.
Well, ab, the fact of the matter is that your generation got a thorough cult-Marx brainwashing in primary school while old fart Boomers like me escaped it. I actually escaped Nixon’s racial integration schemes. Those of us who are on this side of the Great Divide are a bit suspicious when we meet you young’ns for the first time. We’re not sure what you know and when you knew it. Caution, you see. We need a secret handshake.
We do at that
I think the limit of cultural Marxism in my day was Fat Albert whose message was roughly “Black Folks are different than Whites but at heart want/need the same stuff.”
Despite that most of my school days were in a 100% White school that considered physical courage to be a high virtue and while it could not exactly be directly taught we had mandatory use of the wire slide in P.E!
Ironically a hypothetical public school system in a Dissident Right society would resemble the Charter School system of today with heavy IQ segregation though we’d have political commissars .
As mentioned before, the Boomers are a generation in decline—as in we are old and dying off. Next two decades will wrap our stay here—unless Corona virus finishes us first.
Bloomberg news had an article wrt this turnover—specifically as to wealth. They estimated that the largest transfer of wealth, intergeneration transfer, with occur in the next decade or so—$62T. Where’s that going? One guess, Millennials.
Its probably going to be a lot less. Many, maybe most Boomers are spendthrift.
Besides us Gen X will be getting some too.
Boomers come from the time of more reality. that is even if they come from rich families they were expected to work any jobs—like dirty ones to learn to work. they would work their way through college when it was still possible. They are the last who remember reality of life. They are the first generation of what I call homo–televicus so they still have some connection to reality even though very little .
The older Millennials are often pre Internet since that generation started in 1981,
The youngest ones were born in 1996 , some of those had pre internet childhoods too.
Its not media or cellphones though those did contribute.
I’d argue what makes Gen Y like it is now is the brittleness of society. One mistake, one bad choice and your life is ruined.
The vast amount of slack Boomer’s had and the someone lesser amount Gen X had was gone.
They can’t afford to make mistakes and have been screwed over economically for Boomer’s and again.
Gen X at least had a White country though its telling Gen X has never had a President (President Obama was a young Boomer ) and neither will till most of the Boomer’s die off.
And if anything thinks society is anything but brittle. One nasty flu basically gave the globe a massive depression where there may be no recovery point and no functional economy for decades.
It’s as unfair to blame the pandemic for whatever economic fate awaits us, than it would be to blame the 1929 flu season for the start of the Great Depression. These happen because of decades of bad choices, government interventions and general eocnomic rot.
Some yes.
No economy could survive what happened with the strip mining our economy nor exposure to a novel genetic engineered virus from our trade partner.
More importantly baring a dictatorship, the US will not ever have a balanced healthy economy.
Our culture is entirely overcome with graft, grifting and for many a truculent refusal to pay Americans decent wages. If this were not the case Gen Y would be 67% wealthier than they are , maybe more,
Instead everything went to the 1% with a pittance to the 10% below them.
Truth is a huge number of so called businessmen would rather starve the US for vital resources or just TP in order for higher profits. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with closing a business that can’t turn a dime but society cannot tolerate being shorn of resources for short term profits
If you could see the list of things that we no longer make because China trade is cheaper , you’d see why we are in massive trouble.
It must stop and the proper price including clean up , regulatory costs and wages must be paid if the US is to survive .
And before the usual suspect chime in whining about the cost of regulation. In the past deregulation hasn’t done the trick. The loot for a few years than move onto greener pastures anyway.
Making regulation sound is fine but no one is getting out paying for civilization.
Or well we wait a decade or two and join the 3rd world . Choose wisely.
LOL, trying to squeeze in this comment before The Third Rail starts.
Sexual Utopia in Power is a very important, and very terrifying book. Highly recommended. Even if Counter-Current’s payment processor is down, you can probably find it at LibGen, and then donate $20 to Counter Currents (actually, I know you can do that because that’s what I did, LOL.)
But I should point out to the Zman that that books is only enormously influential because somebody took the trouble to collect Devlin’s articles into a book.
I’ve seen people needling you about this, Zman, and they’re right: it’s inexcusably low-energy for people like you, Derb, Sailer, Heartiste, et al not to put in the few hours needed to “bookize” your writings. Devlin did it, Moldbug did it, somebody did it for Jonathan Bowden–and kaboom, big influence.
You’re just letting H-bombs’ worth of influence lie on the ground! Come on, man!
Ah, Third Rail. Wish Lauritz was still with them. Cast of hosts is hit or miss these days, but mostly better since the Chinaman dog guy took over. Lol
The unevennes of right-wing podcasts–both in content and production values–is almost comical.
After getting rid of my TV, podcasts are my new “nothing better to do default activity.” Probably still better than insidious network propaganda, to be honest.
But sometimes the “talent” say something arresting that really sticks with you. It’s like those dumpster divers who occasionally find a new computer or something, LOL.
Agree. There’s something about a book that accelerates the message. Not sure why, but it does. Also, it’s more of a permanent record.
And, frankly, Z Man is guy that needs to write a book the most. Sailer and Derb are fine, but they’re more poking holes in the current system. That’s useful for recruiting, but Z is the next step forward. He’s writing about what we should do next. How to build something, not just make fun of the system. That’s the book that needs to be written.
Derb did fine job with We Are Doomed!
Oh yea, forgot about that. That was good. In many ways, Z’s book could be We Are Doomed! Part II: We’re Not Voting Our Way Out of This.
Yes. I admire his (inevitable) dry British wit. I’ve listened to his audio show but usually wait a week and read the transcript in about five minutes 🙂
book of original content vs collection of posts.
Well, volunteer to do it for him. The guy is putting out a essay a day and an increasingly proffesional podcast. Presumably holding down a day job to. James Lafond fell in shit, came out smelling like lavender when he found lynn lockheart.
There’s also the ease now of listening anything I want to in my car, including your show, Tucker’s monologue, Scott Adams, etc. As recently as 10 years ago it was Rush or local talk radio.
I listen to audio on my commute or at work. The rest of the time I read blogs or books. I’ve never had my mind blown by a YouTube video or podcast. The information just isn’t there. Even the smart guys who make high brow podcasts just don’t transmit high level ideas.
Coming back to YouTube debates or response videos is like sitting down by the kiddie pool. These people’s ideas are simple minded. It’s a game of constantly going “yeah, but.”
This is the most popular form of political content.
In contrast, my kindle app has evolved my thinking and knowledge. The way to transmit ideas is through books. Smart people write books and it gives them plenty of space to develop their ideas.
Blogs exist in the middle. I can list 6 bloggers who radically changed my life. I can’t say that about books or Youtubers. I don’t know why.
I vastly prefer reading to trying to watch video clips. I find most 20 minute, heck most 10 minute long video clips excruciatingly tedious to sit through.
Most accustomed readers can read 3-5 times faster than they listen.
Videos impart very little information for the time they consume. Much of the content of video is distraction which is why just audio is a better, more focused way of imparting a few simple facts.
Funny thing is, it is a lot easier to propagandize people with video than with the written word and it is far easier to spread the ideas which were initially spread by writing, in the video format.
It is also a lot easier to convince someone of a position via video. A lot of verbal tricks just do not work when written.
Also, the barrier to entry has historically been extremely high for video and fairly small for the written word. Even when low cost video cameras started reaching the market, the costs were still relatively high. You would have to lay out 1000 bucks upfront for the camera and a few dollars for each tape you wanted to send out to people plus postage. Sending out a newsletter was pretty cheap and didn’t involve a lot of upfront costs. You could buy a used mimiograph machine for next to nothing. I am unaware of anyone ever using audio tapes, though you would always find audio tapes or CDs in small religious shops.
But I think the big advantage has always been with and remains so for the big publishers of any medium because of who they are influencing. While podcasts, youtube and blogs may reach hundreds of thousands or even millions, they are the dirt people. The cloud people get their opinions from the NYT, WSJ, WAPO, CNN etc. The dirt people are unable to affect change and so they don’t really matter. The only things the dirt people ever changed are the things the cloud people wanted to change.
But it seems that the dirt people did change something in 2016
But look at the backlash in the form of cencorship, that has followed.
Censorship is a win for us because it hits a lot of normies. Before 2016, white nationalism was David Duke.
I am unaware of anyone ever using audio tapes, though you would always find audio tapes or CDs in small religious shops.
Audio tapes toppled Reza Palavi, the Iranian shah.
OH, I didn’t know that. I know a lot of Islamic stuff gets spread on CD and presumably used to be cassettes. Thanks.
Cassette tapes were great. They were cheap, compact, easy to copy and near indestructible: sometimes the player would make spaghetti out of it, but you could usually fix it with a bit of patience. You could rescue tapes by transferring the tape from a broken cassette into a repurposed one. If properly stored, they last decades.
There’s a reason Pirate Bay has a cassette tape in their logo. You could build a quite respectable music library out of delivering a few newspapers per week, and the players were cheap too. On most stereos, you could record directly from radio, so pirating was near-ubiquitous.
I still use cassettes. Besides already owning a lot of music cassettes from when they were current, it is the easiest way I have found to get a good sounding copy of music off of YouTube. Recompressing YouTube downloads into mp3 generates a lot of noise. Even the YT download services are just horrible. It sounds like it was recorded from an AM radio with poor reception. This is the main problem with digital music. Once it is compressed once, recompressing into a different format just introduces way too many problems.
I just create a playlist, hook it up to my cassette deck and I’ll have it on tape. I also have a lot of old mix tapes I created in the 80s and 90s.
That’s why he had the windows opened and had the fingernail pulling stepped up at the big Prison in Tehran. People out doing their chores, strolling past, were reminded that Savaak was everywhere. (Until they weren’t, that is)
Savak was no worse (nor better) than any secret police in that part of the world, and certainly a lot better than what followed.
“People will welcome a dunce into their home if he is fun at parties, but not invite the smart guy with the unpleasant demeanor.”
Oh f**k, that explains so much…..
I have a theory.
Most human beings will Think only as last resort.. They’ll find a Social solution first , a Physical one second and Think last.
This is evolution in action as the cost to using brainpower is high and most people only have a little of it.
Boffins and the like are the opposite, Think, Physical , Social last
The other category, of people is Physical. Social, Think in that order
These guys, we’ll call them jocks are tolerated more than thinkers since the gap between action preferences is smaller
I’m tending to agree with you, AB, case in point, myself. As I get older, I get mentally lazy. There’s just crap that I really don’t want to think about. I have a wiz-bang cell phone the kids gave me. Screw all the apps and settings and photography and internet—all I want is to *dial* a damn 7 digit number. Most of the time it is turned off and sits on my desk. 🙁
At my age I’m now ready to go full SS on everything around me.
At my age, flatulence is the real killer and I’m a spreader.
Social Security? ;p
I bet you could get self protection sponsors for your podcast. You could then spend the first 3 minutes each time touting their wares.
Dear Z-Man, we really like your column and are happy with our relationship, but we have received some complaints about x. If you could just tone it down a little bit, maybe not cover x so much, it would be mutually beneficial.
Signed,
Your Sponsor.
I would be okay with a podcast sponsor, but it would have to be something I approve and worth my while. From time to time I get items from companies and I mention their wares. The Alaska Chagga guys, the Mighty White Soap guys, Ammo.com are three that come to mind. I’ve turned down all site ads, even one lucrative one. If I’m going to junk up the site with ads it better be worth it and the company better be on our side.
Plus, bread is thicker than ideology. The companies almost always cuck when some SJW can bring a lot of pressure on them. I suppose you can’t really blame them. After all, YOU, not them are the real target. Not only do they have to worry about SJWs screwing up their websites with DDOS attacks and the like, but now they have to worry about their bank closing down their lines of credit or their ability to accept credit cards for payment.
Woke capital in support of SJWs at the banks and online payment processors is the crux of the problem. It’s hard to be part of the online world if your payment options are limited to cash and bullion via mail.
Thanks Z Man. That is what many of us appreciate about this site. We sense it’s genuine and not just a way for the author to become famous or influential. Although you are very influential in this thing. For those of us whom have met you we know for certain your commitment to the dissident movement is genuine.
Have you found the SubscribeStar approach to be beneficial? I think I learned about it from you. I have six humble subscribers myself. I found it was very difficult even to get people to sign up who WANTED to sign up. For example, I’d get the, “Oh, yeah, I need to sign up for that, I’m just never at my computer when I think about it” (my younger brother told me that, haha, and finally did sign up). I’ve had family members who read my blog who have had me sign them up at parties.
I’m closing in on 500 days of consecutive daily posting, and it really is a roller coaster. I’ll go weeks with abysmal daily page views, then occasionally get loads of traffic (a post I wrote about Tom Steyer’s belt was bringing in huge traffic in late 2019-early 2020).
Great insights today, as always. Time to start a Super Chat.
Strange, I though I read on a blog the other day that Ron Unz had died of the Covid in early April.
The Mandela-Unz effect?
Ron is Jewish. So he’s always dying of something terrible. Diagnosed with yet another terrible condition even after death and resurrection.
There’s other factors at work as well. First, I’d wager that a lot of people on our side of the divide are more readers and writers. At least I am. While I listen on Friday, I’m more engaged with your written content. I own a library of well read, annotated books.
The left hasn’t been readers for a long time, because unlike the dissident Right, they and their dancing partners have owned the airwaves. Of course, it’s agitprop, and now that the Boomer God of TV is dying, they’re moving to corner the market for online video agitprop.
We’re stuck with samizdat.
Their propaganda is embedded in everything, even stuff that has nothing to do with their politics. It is even in their advertisements for the junk we are supposed to consume. It is in the bottom line assumptions of our culture. Like if you want to establish a bad guy in a TV show, just have him be mean to a woman or say something racist. It will just be automatically assumed this is a bad guy you hate.
When you have been away from TV/Movies for a long time, it is amazing how quickly that kind of stuff just jumps out at you when you are forced to watch it.
I wonder if the immolation of entertainment in this fake plague might leave a vacuum that we could fill with our agitprop.
I’ve been wondering what happens if Disney goes under.
it would help to rescue whatever remains of our old agitprop, which still has symbolic relevance.
and i’m not even talking about Christendom restoration, which is also important, but about any secular cultural totem/artifact of any size. for example, was seeing that James Bond is getting ever more subverted recently, while also that there’s been a countercurrent following of his older movies, to the point of making fan-fiction and modded videogames. we should either cater to this crowd with similar characters (what Vox Day attempts with the superhero fandom, however successfully or not), or revive similar ones that may be easier to deal with the copyright issue. for example many older pulp fiction antiheroes such as Marlowe are not currently being paid attention to.
if there’s anything the left has way too much of a stronghold, is in youth culture, and they achieved that by destroying and/or subverting boy culture. if white and male, our heroes are either faceless surreal bureaucrats, messed up druggies, or thoughtless soldier-tools. and of course, the villains are fat old aryans. heck white roles don’t even have a sacrificial role allowed, which isn’t always healthy (which is why the Christ the King devotion is important), they rather have mentor roles for the young femdiverse hero to surpass. (((they))) have been writing this in thru (((showbiz))) for decades. of course, doesn’t mean we still should take it so willingly.
@tarstarkas. It’s quite diabolic actually. Take the Amazon Prime program “Upload” just released May 4th. Who knew that in 2035, every other person would be a talented, employed black person? Of course, all the bad guys are super rich white guys. The plot was actually engaging, but that just makes the fact that it was coopted for the racial propaganda more infuriating. One has to ask why super rich guy Jeff Bezos seems driven to employ legions of hack black actors for his Amazon Prime original productions. It smells like a giant pile of social engineering to me.
Seriously dude. Don’t you know that anything produced with big money is going to be racial agitprop. Its called programming for a reason
Besides multiculturalism is the elites religion and to them a civic necessity and so they will flog it at every opportunity in hopes it sticks.
Nearly everything is woke trash these days and the best thing you can do is get rid of the TV, get rid of the subscriptions and do almost anything else Go read an old book or draw or whittle or something.
This not only keep the amount of poison you are forced to consume to a minimum it reduces the bad guys income.
Actually these racial fantasies in video media can work to our side’s advantage. Even the most brain-dead moron must venture out into the real world at least occasionally, and he’ll notice that the color balance is quite different there than what’s portrayed on TV.
which is why they are not wanting to let us go outside anymore…
I agree with you Pickle Rick. Without trying to flatter myself or others in Our Thing, reading is the more thoughtful and discursive activity. But I also find it supremely ironic that I’m agreeing with a comrade who’s avatar is from a wildly popular video animation. Clearly, you complete the trifecta and “watch” as well as read and listen. I suspect most of us do.
Digital Camouflage. It’s too easy to pick out badthinkers when they draw attention to themselves with Viking runes, Confederate flags or other easy to recognize stuff. How many other thousands of cartoon pickle fans are on the internet?
Besides, we don’t have to cut ourselves off from all entertainment. We just have to be sure we don’t pay our enemies to do it all.
I agree that we should not give them any money, but I also think we should not let their agitprop into our heads. Plus, for me anyway, the POZ and the racial messaging just ruins it for me anyway. I used to occasionally watch The Walking Dead with my wife, but it became so blatant that I just couldn’t watch it anymore. The apocalypse is going to be gays and race-mixers!
😉
I think also there’s the impulse buying thing. Video is more impulse-driven; reading is more of a deliberate activity. Guess which one produces more impulse buyers of that ten seconds of fame.
That is where the whole super chat thing works. People see names being called out so they send a few bucks to hear their name and comment. It’s like buying a candy bar at the checkout line. Those add up quickly. Think about the math. For a full time streamer, $300 a show in super chats is not unreasonable. A small guy getting $200 is still making 50-60K for very little work. Then you have the tax issue. In most cases, this is not taxable income.
I consume all the media types with the exception of printed hard copy. For me, the voice is far more important than the format or platform. Without integrity, all you are is another grifter or dancing monkey fit only for entertainment. Just as ancient Romans would throw stones at the monkey to watch him shriek and caper… I troll the monkeys to watch them flip out and start flinging feces. 😆👍
But that gets old fast.
I set my watch and compass to this blog and a handful of others. It isn’t because we agree on everything, it’s because of the skilled presentation and the others in the comments. It’s important to me to have my say and others theirs. It’s done here honestly for the most part, sometimes with humour… and it’s a good place to be. I always come away with something.
I hope you make a million bucks Z, and keep on doing what you do. One day I WILL donate financially… but for now my hands are full trying to stay off the impending bread lines.
Cheers.
Late to the party and sorry for it. How are the revenues untaxable? Aren’t they either compensation for services, thus taxable as income, or gifts subject to gift taxation?
Not attempting to present a problem here but I am sincerely self-interested given I have paid, perhaps stupidly, taxes on compensation received from streamed webinars in a technical field.
In any event, keep of the fantastic work. Life everybody else here, I want to buy your book(s) to distribute to normie prospects. Good luck regardless.
cypto deposits and withdrawals hard to track but if you are making enough the govt. will find out eventually. may take awhile. as in years. bank deposits of $ will be red flag.
Once you withdraw from crypto the transactions are easy to track. The government then backtracks and you have provided an ironclad ledger of evidence. They’ll squeeze you for access and data, and unless the amounts are truly grand that years in the hoosegow are worth it you will comply. The money is now theirs. Which it is anyhow. I am unhappy I’ve paid the piper but I sleep better than I would otherwise.