Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast as well as some thoughts on the Army – Navy football game.
Thirty years ago, the typical right-wing person would have held a dim view of whistleblowers and their media accomplices. Those whistleblowers were always left-wing people with the strong odors that come with it. They were motivated by left-wing morality rather than republican virtue. Their complaints about the government were motivated by their opposition to America. These stories usually made those who stood for republican order look like the villains.
Probably the most famous example is Daniel Ellsberg. He is the man who released the top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in the Vietnam War to The New York Times and Washington Post. This was in 1971 and Ellsberg was a fanatical left-wing antiwar protestor. He violated a number of laws in releasing those documents, but he was on the Left, so it was okay. Left-wing lawbreaking was always okay as long as it served left-wing interests.
That was another country ago. Today, the typical right-wing person has a new respect for the government whistleblower. You see this with Julian Assange, who is being transferred to the United States for a show trial. The only people speaking out about his treatment are conservatives. Here is a story in Breitbart that manages to tie Assange to an old paleocon concept. It is one of those times when you know they do not know the source of the phrase, as otherwise they would never use it.
The Assange story is a good example of how partisanship within the mainstream makes rational discourse impossible. When Assange was leaking information damaging to the Bush crusades, they were not fans of Assange. Of course, the Left loved Assange and treated him like a modern day Che Guevara. When WikiLeaks embarrassed the Democrats then the Left suddenly hated Assange. It took a while, but eventually the conservatives figured out how to back the whistleblower.
Interestingly, those same conservatives have nothing but contempt for Chelsea Manning, the sexually confused former Army soldier who provided documents to Julian Assange back in the Bush years. For a lot of reasons, Chelsea Manning makes for a troublesome hero for them. Of course, Democrats moved heaven and earth to get their favorite crossdresser out of prison. Then “she” turned on them, as it were. Saying bad things about the police state is no longer left-wing.
These cases, and you can probably put Edward Snowden in there as well, present some interesting dilemmas. The biggest conundrum is the role of the media in these sorts of affairs. They are the platform for disseminating the information being leaked by the whistleblowers. They also shape the narrative around the leaks to paint the person doing the leaking as a hero. The TV tabloid 60 Minutes recently did a puff piece on the leaker, Reality Winner, painting her as a hero.
In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.
Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.
Can we have a civil society in the digital age when billionaire public relations firms are able to work with the state to embarrass opponents? This is what we saw with Trump when the New York Times got his tax returns. Clearly, someone in the IRS or Trump’s accounting firm stole the documents. Then they handed them to the press. This is trafficking in stolen goods. If the item in question was a piece of art from Trumps’ office, everyone involved would be in prison.
This is what makes the Assange case interesting. Whether the rulers know it or not, they are putting this idea front and center. If WikiLeaks is not allowed to publish leaked material, then how can the New York Times do it? There are only three solutions to that puzzle and one of them is the farce of a free press is now over. In other words, if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.
On the other hand, if the courts decide Assange gets the same protections as the New York Times or Washington Post, then the age of secrets is over. In the digital age it is simply too easy to spill the beans on official shenanigans. This then spills into personal areas, as rich people make for good headlines. The NDA’s famous people make their staff sign suddenly mean very little. The only solution for the ruling class is to pump out even more disinformation through official organs.
The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently. If possession of stolen goods is the same for the media as it is for everyone else, then these sorts of cases become very complicated for the media. Suddenly, the SPLC publishing e-mails from one of the people they are harassing becomes a criminal case. At the minimum, it becomes the basis for a civil case against the outlet.
Taken together, all of this points to a central question that lurks beneath all of the recent troubles in America. Can a large culturally authoritarian society like American maintain itself in the digital age? The Assange case is only possible in the digital age and the contradictions it reveals are also only visible in the digital age. In fact, much of what ails modern America is made possible by the Internet. It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.
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The George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin case was what I call my red-pill event but not long after I watched Saturday Night Live make a figure-of-fun out of Julian Assange. As the sketch started I watched keenly – awaiting subversive truth bombs etc but they treated him like he was just some asshole on a police& justice oriented reality show.
NBC has been rumoured to be an organ of the deep state and this was an eye-opener.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=snl+julian+assange
Zman which of the three do you think is the most likely outcome?
1. End to independent media with constitutional protections.
2. End of the age of secrets.
3. Courts reduce media exceptions.
And which is more desirable? I think you picked the first one but clarify.
Trump’s failure to pardon Snowden and Assange, along with the majority of the J6 protestors, while pardoning criminal blacks to appease the Kardashians and their ilk is reason number one I won’t vote for him ever again.
Julian Assange not getting pardoned was a true travesty, indeed.
Snowden, I really don’t care. The guy is a yuuuge drama queen. Nothing the little bastard squeeled about was anything not already in the public domain. I know, i keep up with this stuff and my first impression of the Snowden reveals was “uh, who is this guy covering for?” There was practically no indication he ever utilized any in-system options to get his concerns out. Wouldn’t have worked, of course, but then neither did hiking his diaper and throwing his tantrum from Russia. Americans got super concerned about NSA spying for all of ten minutes. So what did all the drama accomplish? Most likely he was covering for another spy inside the NSA.
Trump and his unwillingness to respond to the 2020 negro riots sealed the deal on a no-vote for me. A lot of people pointlessly died then because the dipshit didn’t declare martial law; he wanted to make the Democrats look bad. At the point, fuck the guy. He deserved to lose.
Digital systems work to make things more efficient. They are a multiplier effect more than anything else. Rather than change the qualitative nature of a thing, they work on the quantitative aspect. So in that sense there is limited danger in the “secular theocracy” coming crumbling down because of a river of 1’s and 0’s running beneath it.
I believe the increasingly rickety power grids are a larger threat to the secular theocracy than any inherent foibles of systems based on digital technology.
To add. really, I think humans just suck at information handling; there’s too much of it to filter out. Plus being constantly stimulated jacks a guy up.
Well thank goodness somebody’s talking about Assange. I imagine all the rest of us are going to hear about the latest dead Negro.
****
(Geez, sorry about the overlong tldr below, maybe the sturm und drang is simply how we adjust to technology.
S’okay. I had woken up, and went back to sleep. I bore myself back to sleep, you see.)
Fittingly, the only “Francis” in the article and all the comments was a reference to “San Francisco”.
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I increasingly believe that we should approach every high-publicity action/issue with the following question: Does this action/issue help, harm, or have no effect on our interests? Whistleblowing is one such matter and should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. For instance, Vietnam ended up being a war that needlessly cost a lot of White American lives; consequently, though Ellsberg’s whistleblowing may have been leftist in tone, it was in the service of trying to stop a bad war and therefore could only help regular White American interests. That’s not to say that Ellsberg should necessarily have been elevated to hero status, only that his brand of whistleblowing would merit our support if it happened today. Now that the American Empire demonstrates consistent extreme anti-White prejudice, we should support anyone who exposes or humiliates that Empire. We should embrace Assange and Snowden because their actions greatly discredit the Empire. I’m getting past the point of caring about any fixed principles. Even “left” and “right” have grown tiresome to me. Does something help or hinder our interests? That’s the central question. If something has no effect on our interests, we ought not waste time and energy bothering with it.
The avoidance of distraction and wasted effort is indeed a worthy course of action in this era of information (and disinformation) overload, but even that is insufficient given our current rate of decline. It’s not enough to just sidestep the landmines and optimize your efficiency while standing on the sidelines. The Borg are committed to forcing the collapse as soon as possible, and everyone is going to need a restoration of real robustness in order to survive what’s coming. Debate time is over. Get to a safe place. Get fit. Get ready.
My favorite (ex?) lefty, Kunstler has a great piece on this today.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/flood-tide-of-darkness/
ltdr. It is time for men to be men.
“Even “left” and “right” have grown tiresome to me.”
Good point. Lately I find myself saying ‘left’ when I more precisely mean something like ‘anti-white’ or ‘anti-human’ lol.
Here, here.
Even ten years ago I would have balked at the notion of standing side-by-side with men like Roger Waters or Bobby Kennedy Jr.
Today I’m doing just that, applauding Roger Waters for his continuing support of Julien Assange, and recommending Kennedy’s book, The Read Anthony Fauci, to everyone I can.
In the days of Vietnam, the far-left was on the outside of power, looking in covetously. By the 1990s they had completely taken control of the universities, and by extension the government. Now they ARE the empire.
Some old school leftists are still fighting the empire, and to that end, I’ll stand alongside them. We can sort out our differences later, after the empire falls.
The most important thing anyone can do today is stress these things to our family and friends in the military. They have to understand that their continuing military service is the single greatest weapon the far-left possesses.
Without the empire, the far-left does not have a world reserve currency, it cannot underwrite the rules of the global economy to its own advantage, and it cannot pay for its own excesses. Corporate America showed it was all-too-willing to grovel at the feet of the 1960s Marxist/Maoist revolutionaries of academia. Will the frontline soldiers of the US military do the same? Everything, literally everything, depends on whether they do.
Pretty much any whistleblowing exposing the shenanigans behind any war uncle Sam has participated in all the way back to and including the war between the States is OK by me.
Am I the only one that sees hints of the Krell (from the film “Forbidden Planet”) in our current world? In the movie the Krell develop technology that allows them to “think” things into reality; e.g. if you want a house you imagine it in your mind, and the technology materializes the house as imagined. What the Krell didn’t count on was the deep dark thoughts people have, and so the Krell destroyed themselves inadvertently. The internet and social media operate this way in the emotional and mental spheres (and increasingly, int real world; re: 3D printers). we have tons of technology with obvious bad side effects, like pollution, so the notion of telecommunications technology having a negative effect on society isn’t fanciful.
Write the screenplay. It will become the first movie I might actually pay to see in the past two decades. Who’s going to play the Anne Francis role? I think I got my first erection watching that movie back in the day.
I enjoy when TomA moves from the abstract to the personal!
Social media certainly has disasterous effects on the social lives and skills of young people. Attention craving, neurotic autists produced on assembly line.
is every major country in the world going through the same madness? it seems so. this suggests to me it is epigenetic in nature. we see widespread mental illness, which supports this thesis. world leaders seem mentally ill to me; xi is busy destroying china, for example. i am personally changing my life (and lifestyle) to minimize all contact with other people. not going unabomber level of isolation, not going to be a hermit. just not letting anyone (outside of family and friends) get anywhere near my life (if that makes sense).
It is a worldwide cattle killing cult
“just not letting anyone (outside of family and friends) get anywhere near my life (if that makes sense)…”
It makes perfect sense. One simple way to accomplish this is to set up an email with your first name, but a nom de plume surname. I did that a few years back, as it seemed every new acquaintance wanted to “google” others, usually benign, but always annoying as what In did for a living, etc., had ZERO to do with whatever brought us into the same room. Instead, only the pen name email is used to sign up for things, and while I never introduce myself as that name unless to a perfect stranger, the dullards of our time just assume that’s my surname and I have never been asked.
And these same sheeple usually never, ever ask what I do for a living. Lawyers, accountants, they will prattle on endlessly when asked that same question, but never ask it back. They are incurious, solipsistic, the modern man, so no reason to let them any closer to my life.
I introduce myself by first name only, and again cannot remember the last time anyone asked for my surname. If Silence Dogood was good enough for Franklin, for his purpose of anonymity, there is nothing more for me to add on this score.
I view every casual interaction with strangers while out as a potential threat to be assessed. I no longer try to prosetylize or discuss “issues” with anyone outside my immediate trusted circle, and confine my comments to the weather. If conversation veers to my opinions on anything else, I fake a hearing disability and after their third try they give up and walk away while I am smiling, shaking my head and cupping one ear.
Meanwhile, the DNC and Democrats were insisting that Hillary’s emails had been stolen, and given to Assange, by ‘Russian hackers’
Another interesting facet of Julian Assange’s publication of the damaging Hillary emails, is the story of Seth Rich’s murder.
Rich was a Democratic National Committe employee who Assange implied was his source for those emails.
Cyber sleuths investigating the breach of the DNC computer insisted that the download of the emails from the DNC website happened too fast to be the result of an online hack; a data-transfer that quick could only have been done via an on-site download from the DNC computer to a memory stick.
Putting it all together, it seems likely that Rich downloaded the telltale emails from a computer at his DNC workplace, and gave the thumbdrive containing them to Assange.
Then Rich was murdered, at 1:30 one morning, as he was walking home from a DC bar he had spent the evening in. The “robbers” took nothing— not his watch, not his wallet.
By all accounts, DC police did little in the way of investigation, not even bothering to interview the other patrons from the bar. They wrote it off as a robbery gone bad— suggesting that someone or something had scared the robbers away before they had a chance to grab anything— though there’s no record of that happening.
Many people believe that Rich was killed as a warning to anyone else who may be tempted to out members of the Ruling Elite.
Like Assange, Snowden did all Americans a favor. The only reason we know about the NSA’s recording of American’s communications is because of the material that Snowden leaked.
Of course our Rulers need to anathematize these whistleblowers as ‘threats to national security’.
While in fact, the transparency they’re fighting for— which allows American citizens to understand what our Gov’t is up to— is the basis of a truly secure nation: one in which our rulers are unable to hide their nefarious deeds behind phony claims.
“Like Assange, Snowden did all Americans a favor”
“Fourth Amendment. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….”
What do you do when the government SYSTEMATICALLY violates the constitution?? Without Snowden it would still be a ‘conspiracy theory’
Selective prosecution is SOP. Compare the prosecution of the J6 defendants with the 2020 rioters. I can’t imagine that it will be any different with this sort of thing. Who/Whom?
I agree. I’d be surprised if it even occurred to those behind his persecution that there was any dilemma involved.
MBlanc46: Suddenly we find an ‘immigrant’ labeled by her nation of origin instead of termed ‘California woman’ and her White face is to be the image of the prosecuted looter. Who/whom indeed. Never, ever forget that.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10303137/Woman-charged-stealing-300-000-designer-merchandise-SoCal-stores.html
That’s from the UK’s Daily Mail. They do slip up from time to time. They are however fast becoming the go to place for what’s happening in the US.
These guys are worth a look too.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cia-liberal-media-outlets-the-real-anthony-fauci/
Did you look at the article? No slip up. They posted a picture if this woman and told us she hails from Russia. They don’t do this for browns or blacks, unless they are describing the color of getaway vehicle or clothing.
Why would they show her face. The important thing is the color of her car, isn’t it?
Ah, shoot. Do we have a tracker for how many conserva-bots will come out and bravely declaim, “Assange Was A Traitor!”?
“The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently.”
If TPTB can’t use media exceptions, they will eventually lose one of their most powerful tools. That’s why I don’t think the Supreme Court will ever rule against them in this regard. Oh, they may have a show trial to let the peasants think that they are really on their side, but it will have no teeth and just be more Kabuki theater. You saw how Facebook recently admitted that their “fact checking” was really just opinion so you can’t hold them liable. If they are ever held to the same standards as the media (which are not enforced) then there will be some evidence that the control of the judiciary by the elite is actually slipping. I won’t hold my breath.
You misunderstand. Legal protections will surely be removed, as with self defense. De jure immunity for speech and journalism for all will be replaced by de facto immunity for the Clouds and their pets. The propaganda organs of Those Who Hate Us will still be free from prosecution, but the rules will remain unwritten so that they may stamp us out when some Dirt Person gets uppity.
what makes me laugh, is the biden people think they are hiding all the bad news from the public, and and are “getting away with it”. meanwhile, every single person in the country see the prices of everything going up — a lot — they see the afghan debacle in all it’s gory mess, they see the crime images (or live in a place where it is happening), etc, etc, etc. so the only people they fool are themselves. but the absolute cherry on top, is biden’s vaxx mandates were never legal, and corporations were never immune, and now the woke companies will be BK’d by innumerable law suits.
Off topic but related to Friday’s podcast:
I recently had to endure an orientation from a neighboring public school district. The entire orientation was dedicated to multiculturalism, diversify and equity. Very little was even mentioned about the actual education of children.
In case you are seeking a career change, the Diversity Recruitment Specialist position is currently open. In the near future, the essential function/typical task listed in the job announcement will simply be “facilitate and oversee the removal of white teachers and staff.” Middle class whites are working hard to pay taxes to fund programs designed to pluck then out.
On the bright side, you can earn up to $105,000 annually your first year on the job. Any and all who aspire to be a DiAngelo grifter, the woke Jim Snow world is your oyster.
I think an important role of the DR and just normal white people in general who value a true education will be in the formation of new private schools.
I can see, for example, home schools going through a “shake out” period where the people really good at it start scaling up and eventually found a new school. Or however it takes form, maybe just some guys get together and start one.
I agree. I work with a guy whose daughter is in the same grade at the same parochial primary school as my daughter. When I asked him why he sends his daughter there, he told me (exact words) “because I don’t want her to come home and ask, ‘Daddy, can I spend the night at Shaneequa’s?'”
Since it’s only a primary school, and there’s no private secondary school within 40 miles, we both agreed that in a couple years we’re going to have to come up with an alternative. From casually sounding out a few other parents, we wouldn’t have to go it alone.
Let me take this a little further… The machine behind this is massive and because of the low IQs in charge of it requires endless time & resource. Whatever they wish to accomplish takes 3 times as long at 4 times the price. There are vast oceans of taxpayer money being funneled into this at every level of government now.
I’m seeing this first hand recently in a way that brings it out into the open with literal dollars and cents figures behind the ‘cost of diversity’. It is higher than you can possibly imagine. Millions of dollars of carve-outs in every State budget along with millions of federal funding they are ‘eligible’ for if they meet diversity goals (i.e. f-ck Whitey).
There is endless grift and bureaucracy where very little is accomplished but makework gibs jobs are giving brown genetic aliens six figure incomes on the gub’mint payroll while you toil away at your back breaking labor.
And then, to add insult to injury, once they manage to f-ck it all up which they invariably do after several years and multi-millions of dollars later they bring in ‘consultants’ (read: White and Asian Males) to fix everything also racking up millions more in the process. But! Even those consultants themselves must use ‘DBE partners’ (which means Disadvantaged / Minority owned etc Business Entities). And the percentage varies.
So even in -fixing- the incompetence of diversity you must use -more- diversity to slow the process down and allow for more gibs & makework to correct the original dysfunction.
Now times all the above by every state and local government in the US and the Fed and nearly every department that government manages: Education, Labor, Social Services, City Operations, HHS, etc. and you see the true black pilling scope of it.
It’s brown retards getting six figure gibs on your broken back all the way down, and it will only get worse. Decouple yourself from this system ASAP White man. It is built to break you mentally, physically, financially, and spiritually.
Apex: Absolutely agree. The only way for Whites to survive, in any form, is to separate. Yes, I’ve read all the comments about how ‘they’ will come for every White community, about how nowhere is safe, etc. Not disputing anyone else, just urging everyone to move to as rural and White a location as one can manage. There is no purpose in openly challenging the Behemoth today. Instead of wasting White lives and futures with pointless protests and futile voting or attempting to ‘fix’ an innately anti-White system from within, we MUST separate. With all due respect to those legitimate atheists/pagans here (anyone following any other ‘faith tradition’ is here only to troll Whites), here is a very interesting (and very militant Christian) take on why modern society is deadly to White people:https://xyz.net.au/2021/12/our-civilisation-needs-to-fall/
Yes that–sit on your hands, drag the anchor, wait them out, give no help, offer no advice. My standard response when confronted with these “it’s all your fault because you’re white, now help me” issues is “you’re in a pickle aren’t you?”..
Schools are shithead factories. That was the whole point. Kill individuality, create compliant meatbags. Wear your mask. stand 6 ft. apart, take this shot, it’s good for you.
First, the Taki article today may well be one of the best pieces of writing Zman has ever done. Both the message and the style are off-the-charts excellent and borders on timeless literature. The metaphorical visual of George Will “and his wig” being escorted out of the ballroom with his nose high in the air and a stick up his ass is iconic.
But to today’s Zman post. It has to get worse before it can get better. IOW, Normie will not (really can not) wake up to the reality that almost all major news outlets are covert propaganda organs whose sole function is indoctrination of the masses. Lying is automatic, like a Pavlov response, and it’s so ingrained that they couldn’t tell the truth by accident. I often comment that watching TV is the equivalent of rubbing feces into your eyes and ears, but that analogy may be inadequate. TV exposure acutely destroys brain cells and ravages the mind like a runaway syphilis infection. And every Normie I know keeps the Idiot Box on ALL THE TIME.
Assange is neither hero nor villain. He’s just the latest snack being fed to the lions in the Roman Colosseum of the modern era. We are being both entertained and warned at the same time.
The Taki article was really well done Z. You have indicated the readership there tends to be much less radical. It was a very gentle but persuasive way to lead that audience to the very radical conclusion.
I was unfamiliar with the 19th century conservative writer mentioned and it led me to think about the nature of conservative vs unconservative ideologies. The dissident right falls very much in the unconservative category at this point though I’m sure it’s smart to camouflage it as much a possible. I wonder if it’s possible to rebrand the progressives as ‘unconservatives’ and appropriate the progressive label or some variation?
“if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.”
Huh? If only regime-supportive media are protected, then “constitutional protections” aren’t even “a thing”, as the kids say.
One of the turning points for me was a conversation, over a rapidly diminishing bottle of Col. Taylors finest, shortly after he returned from his second deployment in Afghanistan. He’d spent it doing analysis on after-action reports and interviews across the country. While he preserved “classification” it was clear we were being served a big shit sandwich by the Pentagon—partially confirmed by Manning’s documents. This was a light colonel, not some guy parked in a cube seeing 1/100th of what was crossing the general’s desks. And frankly, all the Snowden releases matched up with what I was told by one of the original developers of the Tor system, over lunch in DC, not long after the first incident. I’ll confess to being a bit more “gung ho” prior, but now understood better my childhood memories of my Dad (a Korean War vet, along with his brother and uncle) when he became loudly disillusioned with Vietnam in the late 60s. He knew what a stalemate was and what Eisenhower warned about.
Journalism is as dead as Disco. You cannot even get the straight story on the proceedings of your local school board now. The journalistic Caste fused with the politician caste years ago. They recycle themselves like hockey or basketball managers. From CNN to the Harris campaign to Facebook to private equity back to MSNBC etc…..it’s a closed-loop system.
They have only one enemy: the people outside the closed loop. Witness the uproar when guys like Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald go off the reservation and try to actually “do journalism”.
The regime doesn’t even bother itself with propaganda anymore because the propaganda arm has fused itself into the regime. It’s now an autonomic system in the regime, like breathing. “Reporting” is really just elements of the regime publicly settling cores with each other, like the Kamala Harris staff in-fighting story. Zman was correct many months ago comparing today’s journalism to the old Pravda editorials or May Day parade pictures, when you read the paper to see which factions were ascendant.
One reason why I throw each $5 a month. Disagree with both on a lot of items, but both shoot as straight as one can in the journalism business. Though am always alert for the old Chiat Day Mojo dictum taking hold…”How big can we get before we get bad”.
The left and the media created all kinds of loopholes and carve-outs with regard to law back in the 60’s and 70’s when they were working on their coup, that they are now frantically trying to close up before the Right can use them. THe Assange case is an attempt to close up the Ellsberg loophole, just like the 1/6 persecutions are an attempt to slam shut the riot/protest loophole opened up in the 1960’s, and used as recently as 2020.Whether, and how, they will do this in a culture that was taught to revere “whistleblowers” and “demonstrators” for the last sixty years is an interesting question.
The Left in America and probably everywhere is an ends justifies the means belief. It is why they can be for free speech and then be for corporate censorship. Things like the law, rights and democracy are a bus they ride from one stop to the next.
Was it Erdogan that once said something along the lines of “Democracy is just a bus we ride until we get to our stop”. The totalitarian mind is the same, whatever the politics.
It’s why dual citizen Turks vote for open borders lefties in their adoptive countries like Holland but when they vote nationalist in Turkish elections.
Z Man: “The Left in America … is an ends justifies the means belief.”
Learn from those who are successful. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
I have taken this lesson to heart except that my end is a white ethnostate. Every kind of unethical behavior is acceptable to achieve the end.
We don’t owe ethical behavior to those who don’t reciprocate.
In meta-politics, partisanship should be avoided. In political practice, partisanship should be embraced.
I summarize it by saying “The internationalists see law and governance of law by constitution as weapons to be wielded against their enemies when convenient and irrelevancies to be ignored when inconvenient.” There is no sharing a civilization with these people.
I know this is off topic though it is relevant in illustrating the general confusion. I sent my normie brother the Anton article on the unprecedented situation of western civ and his response is,
Culture is not a product of biology, it’s a product of education and we need more immigration to replace those bad white people that hate us so we can preserve the culture. Wow!
Do you really believe this is unprecedented?
I think the situation is not all that much different place than we were during the last time of mass immigration in early 1900s. Much of the confusion is that we all of a sudden have a bunch of foreigners around us, and my understanding is that the “heritage” Americans of that time hated the new arrivals just as much as we hate the immigrants today. But regardless, mass immigration creates confusion and hostilities and tears away at the social fabric. I know the immigrants then were white and so forth, but I doubt that mattered or had any real tamping down on the hostilities and confusion.
Second, and I am not an expert on WWI, but that may be a good thing so I don’t get caught up on the details, but the big takeaway that that was a war to end all wars. People were confused, things were tense all over, and the desire was to burn it all down so we could start over. This would be the last of it.
I have a problem with the Anton these for these reasons. Plus I know there is nothing really new under the sun.
And we shut down immigration in the 1924 Act. Post WWI, Europe was a Bolshevist powder keg and as the tide turned against the Left, they started fleeing to the US. You can thank the Poles for stopping the Red Army at the *first* Battle of Warsaw in 1920. While the 1924 Act has some flaws that would bite us in the ass later and the proponents were often denounced as the period-appropriate term for “racists”, it largely did what it was supposed to.
I agree, and I’d add there are enough parallels to say things today aren’t materially different today than what people were experiencing 100 years ago during the last “fin de siecle”
Other than the big difference today is that America may not be in ascendancy.
And I am not picking on anyone here but using the occasion to say that when any historian says “things have never been like this before” he is not talking as a scholar of history but as a salesman.
I can see how you sell books and yourself when you go big and compare America to Rome and, in turn, flatter American sensibilities. But we don’t compare to Rome in any substantial way. Anyone who has been to Rome can see that right off the bat. These comparisons never really did it for me because America has been around for less than 100 years as a power. Why don’t we start making comparisons to ourselves against other “100 year” powers like a Portugal? or a Spain? Or better yet, the USSR as Z and many others have maintained. Why not? A lot of the same stuff going on.
That is not to say that I think America hasn’t been carrying the torch of Western Civilization handed to it from Britain. As Greece handed it over to Rome and Rome handed it over to Iberia and Northern Europe and then Britain. But that’s another story imo. But the real fun is in trying to guess, if not America, who gets to carry the torch from here on out?
Russia, possibly.
SamlAdams: Tragedy is that it wasn’t enacted at least 25 – 40 years earlier (yes, even if it would have prevented the arrival of some legitimate White Europeans of various nations). To prevent the arrival of so many anarchists and socialists and anti-Christian zealots, who sought refuge in a nation they yearned to destroy. The whole ‘Melting Pot’ fallacy could have been avoided, along with the utter swamping of heritage Americans.
Immigration had become a problem long, long before 1924. There’s a reason that the screening stations such as Ellis Island were built. And before that there was a “head tax” imposed upon the captain of any ship transporting “immigrants.” Many of these folks replicated the Founders’ experience as pioneers, going out on the land, building and clearing. Some others founded slums.
Hmm. What was unprecedented in 1900 was new technology, coal powered steamships that allowed much more cross-ocean immigration.
(Oil spies and the Great Game, the contest for military fuel, took off when oil was discovered on Iran’s coast in 1906. Navies rushed to convert from coal to oil boilers.)
It’s probable that oil, the sugar on the anthill, got all the ants scrambling…but did the sudden possibility of fast Empire blow up all the rules?
Today we’re seeing all the ants frantically try to outmaneuver each other using the new sugar, the Internet.
Finance and media at electronic speeds are, unfortunately, the province of a certain bunch who also dream of empire.
But, before their era, came railroads, the telegraph and underwater cables, irst laid in 1850 (!). The speed of commerce and news might have given us the Civil War.
The thing is, these strange federal military inteligence states are only about a century old. They replaced the 500 years of Westphalian kingdoms and empires using horsecart and wind speeds., including 80 years of rail speeds.
Is the confusion of the Woke Revolution just meth on the anthill instead of sugar?
I’m afraid that acheivingTwerking Speed might prove too much even for the galaxy-brained ADHD crowd. Maybe a 1000-Year Woke Reich isn’t in the cards.
Whitney’s brother thinks he can educate them into being white people who hate white people. With all those wunnerful new immigrants, I’m certain it won’t be a Reich, for sure.
On second thought, if ant colonies suddenly started leapfrogging in technology, what would they use it for?
For what they’ve been doing for 160 million years: trying to invade other colonies and slaughter all the ants who lived there.
Wokies must think that erasing their identity is a kind of camoflague. The other ants won’t be fooled.
Interestingly, since ants follow the scent trail of their fellow ants- signals like “food, this way!”- they sometimes all end up following each other in a death spiral:
https://youtu.be/N0HoqjxfvJ4
And before oil it was territory for coaling stations.
Obviously I don’t know your brother, but based on your comment, he needs to be mocked mercilessly and often.
Do people even think about what they say anymore?
Whitney: From what you post about your family, it appears you are an anomaly – a lone outpost of sanity and racial pride among not merely normies, but those deliberately blind to the destruction of the White race. We each must choose our own path, and I realize the importance of family to many, but it sounds as though you are dealing with truly toxic people. I can only wonder whether your attempting to get any of your relatives to notice anything is truly worth your time or trouble. Personally, I would cut off all contact for my own sanity. But regardless, best wishes to you in your private life.
Works around ’em all day, lives amongst ’em all night.
Yet she remains undaunted.
Our gal behind the lines is made of stern stuff, fer sure.
Hats off to a spine of solid steel!
If Assange, a non-American who was not on American soil when he committed the acts they want to try him for, it seems the American police state is claiming global jurisdiction. That is in and of itself a huge problem. But worse, it opens the door to making it a crime for a, say, conservative Pole, in Poland, to say that there are only two genders and that btw, gender is the same as sex. That may be a hate crime to say under future presidentista AOC. So now she wants ‘trans-phobic’ Mr. Lavinsky in Warsaw extradited for his ‘hatred’. I expect that China, Pakistan and Iran will rather like this precedence. Jurisdiction has to be tied to geography and, secondarily, to citizenship. If neither is present I don’t think a country can claim jurisdiction (if you then say bin Laden planning 9/11 I’d make it an act of war, not a legal/police issue). Otherwise any crackpot state can hunt you in any part of the world.
And the Poles will tell her to “fuck off”. We’ve figured out that my wife is likely eligible for Polish citizenship and while this is something I would never have considered before, thinking of taking them up on it. Primarily because it would then devolve to my kids and in the times we’re in, “Plan Bs” that seemed absurd a decade ago, are now operative. Me? I’m coming up on the 400th anniversary of my namesake setting foot on these shores. I’ll have fight it out here.
That’s one of the big dilemmas of our day, at least for many of us
Is it immoral to bail on your country, should one stay back and “fight”? Whatever that means.
Or is family more important? And you do what you have to do make sure they have a better life? And if that means moving to Poland, then you do it.
Not easy. No one wants to be called a “traitor” or a deserter, but doesn’t family outweigh those insults?
My dad had a good point. He says there are always these guys who say “I’m never never give u con my hometown, I will stay back and resist and fight,” but then you are the only one left in a sea of brown people or all the jobs are sipped away and you’re living in a world of squalor and dysfunction. What was accomplished?
Again, not easy.
I figure, what you owe your country is to seize power, by any means necessary, and kill the scum. If you can. Since that is obviously not easy to do, I don’t think you are obliged to share in their collective suicide pact. If a better life, in a more traditional culture, awaits you in Poland, or some remote mountains of Italy or maybe Montana, it would be foolish to wait around to have your head bashed in by some vibrant mob of diversity strength out of some abstract notion of ‘duty.’ JMO.
I agree with you, but their case is not completely vapid, just…mostly. The accusation is that the person who wanted to purloin the secret materials (Manning?) didn’t know how and Assange instructed them as to the illegal steps that had to be performed in order to procure the information.
Now, there’s some debate as to whether or not that is entirely made up itself, though my own feeling is it’s irrelevant.
Fair enough I just hate the idea of universal jurisdiction. Like universal morality it is a version of universalism which is ultimately an attack on people having their own cultures, rules, customs and finally sovereignty. Once you accept universal jurisdiction you are on your way to some kind of world government. Universal jurisdiction is a stick in the hands of globohomo.
Leaking and Whistleblowing should probably be regarded the same way as voting: of some short term utility in terms of winning battles and demoralizing enemies, but of no long term good. It’s nice when someone like Assange embarrasses someone like Clinton, but ultimately the problem of bug-eyed sociopaths like Adam Schiff or weasel faces like the Podestas is not going to be solved by leaking info about the bad things they’re doing. The solution is in not having such people around, or having a ruler or a genuine republic to dispense justice rather than book deals to such slimeballs. Intriguers, subversives, camarillas, Praetorian guards, are all good so long as they are on our side and their actions lead to ends we want. They’re bad inasmuch as they hurt or undermine normal white people. In Washington right now, it’s mostly evil against evil with both sides occasionally taking a break to do things like kick their January 6th prisoners or to somehow otherwise piss on ordinary whites. Win first, invent the moral rationale to lock in the gains after we win. I think Assange deserves to walk because he hobbled that mullet-headed, marionette-mouthed Hillary Clinton, not for some principled stand he took.
You had a great closing paragraph at Taki, and this one was better.
” It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.”
You nailed it here. The principal mission of propaganda organs in an authoritarian police state is to disseminate favorable information and to squelch damaging counter-narratives. The United States’ propaganda organs, which are privately owned, can simultaneously do great damage either way and also be of limited utility to that mission. For example, the widespread blasting of the Russia collusion hoax did massive damage to Trump yet discredited the United States government simultaneously. Blatant censorship of oppositional views has become the norm and squelched counter-narratives, but it, too, has damaged the United States’ already shaky standing in the world and at home.
Censorship tools are available today that are unlike anything previously available to Stalin and the Kim clan but the race is constant to keep apace. The technological tools that empower our police state ironically expose its soft underbelly. We are close to registering “journalists” and outlawing the spread of “disinformation” by the unlicensed. As China has learned, it is tough regime to manage so it has allowed a larger degree of unapproved information than likely will be allowed here in the near term.
To end on a down note, so far the Administrative State has produced shockingly few whistleblowers. It is quite something that no one in the FBI and intelligence services came forward to blow the whistle on the Russia hoax and weapons of mass destruction fraud among other outrages. As long as the State functionaries are well paid, they will play along with only a rare Snowden now and then toppling the applecart. We may be in the moment a long time if the dollar can be propped up another generation or so.
The Whistle Blower is as obsolete as the investigative journalist.
Joe Biden shat himself at the Vatican, and it was in the public domain so fast that no one could even think of doing PR damage control.
And who needs proof of anything anymore? People run around in home made space suits trying to escape the deadly corona virus, buy into global warming, and think their rectums are sex organs. At least 50% of North Americans are incapable of critical thought. The last election was a fraud and people just shrug and do whatever the reigning queers, pedos and grifters tell them.
On the priority list of America’s problems… flow of information is a little ways down the list of things that need to be fixed. People no longer know what to do with solid info…
One example where this would be needed, and it uses “whistleblower” loosely, was when senior FDA officials resigned over the vaccine. Apparently, they were too concerned about their pensions to discuss why.
You make a good point, though, that apathy has made whistleblowers almost superfluous. I do think cases like the FDA resignations would have still gotten attention.
Jack Dobson: With the utmost respect, I must disagree. I understand the gut traditional citizen instinct that if only a certain proportion of people were made aware of ‘x,’ then somehow things would change. Yet I also strongly believe that tradition was always based on fallacious reasoning and is dangerous thinking today. What would change? Why would anyone with any influence whatsoever do anything differently? Who would even hear them?
There is sufficient evidence for such a mountain of wrongdoing and fraud and criminality today that believing any sort of whistleblower or disgruntled bureaucrat or mythical principled member of government would wake anyone up, let alone effect any change, is just hopium. When and if people are truly struggling to eat or remain safe in their own homes from marauding noggers, then perhaps some minimum will truly agitate for change – but even then most will refuse to face the natural facts behind their circumstances. Most ‘revolutionary’ revolts or mobs are composed of angry but essentially directionless and irrational people. The left is highly skilled at focusing that anger to their advantage. I don’t think it’s worth the right’s time to try to change people’s minds or hope for some magic number of Whites to ‘awaken’ to fix anything.
I think threats to health posed by the vaccine would have the same effects as empty stomachs on a slice of people. I think that information would have an effect, however narrowly. I’m not arguing for political solutions but information, to be blunt, that inflames and discredits. The Left, whether justifiably or not, appears to agree because it works diligently to suppress such information and deter whistleblowers such as Assange.
I generally agree with your assessment about the willful ignorance and apathy of the populace but, as one solid example, incendiary information that the vaccines are dangerous from people who would know would accelerate what appears to be some souring on the jabs.
Hmppfpfpfffff. I hadn’t considered that. It’s all true, of course, if the barn caught fire, and the hands chased all the cows out… half of them at least will try to get around them and return to the safety of their stalls and feed, flames and smoke notwithstanding. Those guys will always be around. But America is blessed with 2A guys, Dissidents, and Christians. At length, people like that WILL retaliate and it will not go well for Leftie at all. Not this time around.
But there IS maybe a little hope, 3G. Seems the Aussies had a little protest/demonstration of their own over the weekend. The thing was on over at Blab. The citizens confronted the riot police, pulled a few out of the ranks – and went to town. And I mean – they did a number on them. They pulled their helmets and pads off and beat them senseless. When their fellow officers fell back, the mob threw the helmets and and riot gear at them and set off in hot pursuit. More got cops beaten to a bloody green pulp and beaten with their own batons. I ordinarily love and support the law enforcement people, but… they are taking the wrong orders from the wrong people, and they simply can’t keep doing what they are doing. The point is, things are getting real down there – and you won’t see this in the media. They will brag about arresting our people and punishing them, they will goad you for supporting them, and try to bring in the other failing institutions to help demoralize you.
Everyone is a whistle blower now. You can be in the middle of a full blown riot, and have the truth on the airways before the mass media can even get their stories straight. We are already breaking their toys before they have a chance to do it themselves. At length we will do what they have done to us: break their windows, beat the snot out of their random flunkies as a warning to the rest, slash their tires and we will protect our own as we did with Kyle Rittenhouse. They tried to kill that kid twice, and they are going to pay through the nose for it.
The media is no longer the battle ground. The street is, and like our esteemed blog host, I hate seeing our guys out there cracking heads and getting hurt themselves… but this is where we are at now… and we are winning victories. In Australia, there are more than a few cops this monday thinking twice about beating up women and kids for not wearing masks. Soon their leaders are going to start getting some push back too – if they already aren’t. The queers, the vibrant affirmative action flunkies, the jews and pedos… when the saxon begins to hate, things tend to go very, very badly for them. It is shaping up that way yet again.
again, all this effort by the regime to keep normie in the dark, despite normie never wanting anything but that in the first place.
Obvious lies such as the absence of hyperinflation are so self-evident Normie has a hard time remaining in the dark about it, but, yeah, that’s where he wants to be, telling himself and others they are Great Americans.
karl: Spot on.
“The principal mission of propaganda organs in an authoritarian police state is to disseminate favorable information and to squelch damaging counter-narratives.”
Jack, you highlighted an issue that I struggle with. Is a fair and free press even possible or is everything propaganda? Is there a historical example of the ideal that many of us feel should be possible?
Perhaps I’ve become cynical but I think there will always be a media organ that programs the masses and it’s either them or us. I can’t say I’m happy with my conclusion so maybe someone can prove me wrong.
When you have a ruling elite as corrupt as ours, few good things are possible. Corruption in this context means irresponsible and derelict, not financially corrupt. None of these people thinks they have a duty to the country or society. It is one of the things that binds them together as a ruling class. Civil society is not possible when the people at the top are hostile to the basics of civil society.
It is a great question and you onto something. During the so-called “Free Speech Movement” at Berkely in the Sixites, some critics noted free speech would be encouraged until the Left achieved power, at which point it would stop and be suppressed. It is hard to argue that is not what took place.
Censorship has previously been prevalent throughout the United States, particularly during times of war. The most egregious examples were Lincoln closing newspapers and Wilson raiding newsrooms thought insufficiently loyal to the war effort. To be fair, the United States has had periods where there was unfettered free speech, primarily via admittedly partisan outlets going at each other, and the First Amendment was unique. But those times are in the rear view mirror now, and, yes, the “press” generally has been propaganda.
To state the question as sharply as I can.
You are a journalist who supports Team A against Team B. You think Team B is terrible. The battle between Team A and Team B is intense.
You uncover damaging information about Team A.
Publish it?
The New York Times, I think, publicly announced it would not publish that information ’cause Trump. Yet conservatard gasbags routinely denounce the NYT and then cite it as authoritative when they think it helps their case.
I guess also to be sharp is everything is propaganda. The difference today, and this has happened in the past, is only certain propaganda is permitted.
Weren’t those periods of free speech still regulated by restricting access to those jobs where people could express themselves?
The best way to limit free speeech is to ensure only the right sort of people become journalists.
I remember my professor saying that all countries use propaganda but just that America is better at it
And that few are even aware they are being propagandized speaks to his point.
“As long as the State functionaries are well paid, they will play along …”
I recall an old study years ago where the researcher estimated that a Roman legionary was paid about 3 times the average wage of a farmer. The non-aristocrat officers, optios & centurions (who were all ‘mustangs’ promoted from the legionaries, there being no separate officer track like ROTC for plebeians), got paid 50-100 times the average salary. Then of course there was the free plot of farmland they got on retirement after 20 years of service, which was confiscated either from the newly conquered or after expansion ended from some unlucky souls on the inside.
An empire can last a long time as long as its paid murderers reliably get their gibs. Their separation from those same gibs is a weak link in the control network. Mercenaries won’t kill for free.
The Assange case always seemed like a farce to me. He is a foreigner who allegedly did his so-called crime on foreign soil. Trump’s failure to quash the attempt at getting him was a real disappointment. Instead of pardoning Assange, who helped expose the war in Iraq he so vehemently opposed and what his base wanted him to do, he pardoned black murderers and drug dealers.
Myself, along with many others would have forgiven Trump’s weak term if he came out and pardoned Assange, Snowden, and the J6 protestors. The betrayal of the latter showed everyone he wasn’t our champion, but at best an unstable weapon we could try to control and wield.
Betrayal of the 1/6’ers is unforgivable.
I wonder if he knew or understood on January 20th that they were innocent. I believe he was fed inaccurate information by people he trusted. I wish I knew if he was supporting them in some way. If he has in fact turned his back on them, then you are correct, unforgivable.
Even after all these months, he only dips his toes in the water when it comes to Jan. 6 to see if it is politically advantageous.
Deplorable Granny: “If the Tsar only knew . . . If Comrade Stalin only knew . . . ”
Whatever happened to agency and personal accountability? If Trump “was fed inaccurate information” then it’s still his fault for appointing and listening to and trusting the wrong people. Judge him based on what he truly did or did not do, not what you would like to imagine he thinks or feels. That’s a very female and childish way of looking at the world.
I suspect they told Trump they would put him in prison if he pardoned Snowden or Assange.
Irrelevant. At some point the excuses for Trump need to end. He did some good things and some bad. This was the latter. In all of the instances Chet mentioned (particularly J6) he was wrong.
I have a problem with believing this. If Trump was really worried about prison or even assassination, why is he back running for president again? I mean, if he believed his enemies could and would snuff him, why would he think their attitude has changed? I think the truth is that Trump was just part of the dialectic from the beginning. The fact that he didn’t really contest the treasonous voting farce and pushed, and still pushes, the vaccines make me think the only reason he is still in the spotlight is that he makes money from it. I wonder how much he gets from his rallies?
Trump is old. He doesn’t think as clearly as he once did (long long time ago). His activities are all just part of having fun during his golden years.
Before Twitter blitzed his (pre-presidential run) account he went after the Saudis vis-à-vis 9/11 for years. After the election he goes all-in *for* Saudi Arabia. He was *for* getting out of Iraq until their Parliament asked us to leave (then it was “We’re staying.”) No doubt the blackmail material on Trump goes back to his Studio 54 private room days and has only accumulated since.
The proper response to that from a real leader is “Bring it.”
Assange GAVE the damned election to Trump.
Five minutes to save Assange is too much, so Trump spends six months saving some criminal black rapper in Sweden instead.
I don’t think Jared had his hands wrapped around Trump’s balls, I think he just plain cut ’em off.
Assange is relentlessly persecuted because the elites are terrified he (like Epstein) has much more that might come to light.
They don’t know what he knows, they only know what stupid things they’ve done, and just like any child about to be caught in a lie, they’re embarrassed and afraid they’ll be found out; they’ll burn the house down before they admit to their parents that they threw a party that got a little out of hand when the folks were out for a date night.
The really, really stupid thing?: it’s probably all low grade normal human foibles and lies (like the Clinton camp managing/manipulating the DNC to dump Bernie. Or garden variety sexual piccadilos. Laws passed to personally profit financially from, sinecures given to dumb second sons and daughters, laptops with crazy meth porn on them….really stupid stuff that are embarrassing to those involved.
Everyone wants to think our elites have grand schemes that would be derailed by a revelation of an international satanic pedophile conspiracy, or the J thing, or a multigenerational Rothschild one world order banking plot, etc.
Hardly. It’s the revelation of garden variety corruption and human foibles that they fear because it’s embarrassing. They’ll burn it all down before they get caught and the “press” lets the world know.
Especially pathetic because mostly, no one really cares.
What kind of a retarded name is Reality Winner? WTF Amerika?
And a dissident writer unironically using “Chelsea” Manning as if that was Bradley’s actual name. Is the so called “deadnaming” illegal in the US?
People have a right to name themselves as they please. Note I use the word “hero” instead of “heroine” in reference to Manning.
This is not the usual case of a pseudonym or an artistic name. This is a mentally ill man, most likely driven to insanity by the system. His new name is one of the very few things that the system approves of.
Reality Winner has simply got to be the greatest irony in the history of life on Earth. Maybe in the history of the solar system, even.
That’s his legal name though. FWIW, given his former MOS amd conduct in uniform, “Chelsea” more than fits. The intelligence branch of the Army is a weirdo magnet. Maybe it’s different in the Euro militaries?
Did I wake up in some alternate reality where the dissident right accepts tranny names, because they are “legal”?
Point taken about the weirdo magnet.
No, you woke up in a world where normal people call people by the names they prefer, which has been the case for thousands of years.
Oh please. Like you immediately started saying Kaytlin instead of Bruce. This is ridiculous.
Zman: That sounds like justification for “sanitation workers” and People of Color. I don’t care what people ‘prefer,’ I prefer reality. And you specified ‘normal people,’ and no trannie is normal.
Having been on a middle school playground in America, I can authoritatively state that it is very unusual for people to give the slightest weight to your own opinion as to what you should or shouldnt be called.
The digital age is making even groups like Wikileaks obsolete. Instead of sending the docs to some third-party to upload to a safe location, anyone can use the IPFS to upload the content, permanently, to computers all over the world. Then anyone can read for themselves and no one is technically “in control” of the documents. The only issue now is proof of authenticity, and there are ways to prove that also.
The floodgates are opening regardless, and the only way to circumvent it is to flood the space with so much disinformation people believe literally nothing. While that ill work short term, you can’t have a complex society like ours with zero trust.
I think this will continue as long as the Administrative State functionaries are well paid. Thus far whistleblowers have been shockingly rare. That will change as the economic situation deteriorates but that could be next week or in twenty years.
“Flood the zone” is exactly right. It’s the obvious solution, so that’s what they’ll try… but because they’re stupid, they don’t realize that propaganda only works if there’s some residual trust in the propagandist. Baghdad Bob doing his thing as the city burned around him, or that CNN twit standing in front of a burning building at a “peaceful protest”… that’s their speed.
And it’s all good, because this encourages localism. Even now, quite a few large problems could be solved simply by going and staying local. And who can you trust in an age where everything is a lie? The person you can talk to personally… which means “the person you can beat the crap out of for lying to you.”
(What’s going to be extra fun is re-learning all the tradecraft of early 20th century espionage. How do we communicate with each other in such an environment? Well, it’s Tuesday, so we wear pink carnations in our lapels. The man holding his newspaper upside down is your contact. He will know you by the green band on your fedora…)
” propaganda only works if there’s some residual trust in the propagandist.”
I tend to agree, but there is some indication people have become so estupidfied repetition works even when the recipients know the information is false. Twitter writ large, really..
“I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.” Daisy Buchanan
I have to wonder if the DoD and the inventors of the internet hadn’t gamed this out knowing that a great benefit of the internet would be to create so much confusion it would be to the benefit of the ruling class
If they didn’t know then, at some point they knew clearly.
They certainly know it now. Of course no one would fund or conduct the study, but brain processes likely have been rewired. The exception to the non-study showed social media tends to have a dopamine-like effect on the brains of children and is addictive. That study, of course, was geared toward greater government controls and regulations, but it seemed valid.
just like with video games. and fast food.
no, it was developed solely so military computers (and allied research computers) could exchange information and data. it was the WWW technology that provided the “spark”. that was in 1996 (iirc). PCs didn’t even come standard with a IP stack until around 1998.