The mainstream media has always been biased, but it was never monolithic, as part of the claim of objectivity was to include alternative opinion. The main newspapers during the Cold War made sure to include critics of American Cold War policy along with conservative critics of progressive social policy. The television chat shows made sure to have at least one conservative on the panel. There was always a bias and a lack of balance, but alternative voices did have a place.
Somewhere after the Cold War this ended. It is hard to pinpoint the exact date, but pretty much every terrible media trend started with the Clinton Crime Family blowing into town, so that is a good bet. In the first Gulf War, CNN worked hard to be a legitimate news organization. A few years later they converted themselves into the Clinton News Network and they have never recovered. Outside of staged debates, the mainstream media is a monolith now.
You see that with the Ukraine war. Here are some headlines Drudge has been pushing the last few days. “Russia Tank Fury!” is linked to this post in the Daily Mail, claiming the Russians are going crazy about the latest wonder weapons. Under that one was this post labeled by Drudge as “Nazi Scumbags!” Beneath that one was this one labeled “Nuke Berlin!” which links to this post in the UK Mirror. In the top right was this CNN post, “Fierce New Step By The West.”
On the one hand, these absurd stories can be dismissed as the work of people who know very little about their topics. People working in the mass media are jarringly obtuse and usually assigned to topics about which they have no knowledge, so it follows that their “reporting” is childish and stupid. They have bosses though and they must know that these whoppers about Ukraine are nonsense. Someone in these organizations knows how to use the internet.
More importantly, every mainstream news outlet has at least one government intelligence officer inside the organization. Hundreds of former secret police agents work in American cable news channels. They may be retired from the secret police, but they still have connections, which is why they were hired. On top of the secret police, there are hundreds of retired generals on contract. In fact, there are more retired generals in media than active generals in the military.
That means an airhead like Allison Quinn can pen nonsense stories for the Daily Beast, but CNN has people on staff to check the work of Nick Paton Walsh. There are people hired by the company who had long careers in the military and they can explain to Paton why a handful of tanks is a meaningless gesture. They can use the last year of such gestures to explain this to him and his editors. In other words, there is no excuse for these nonsense stories about miracle weapons.
Of course, this latest batch of just-so stories come at a time when things are looking rather grim for the Ukrainians. Their third defensive line, they have four lines, is about to crumble in the city of Bakhmut. German intelligence is warning the government about the heavy losses the Ukrainians are suffering in this battle. In the south of Ukraine, reports are coming in about Ukrainian units defending positions with nothing but small arms as they no longer have working equipment.
Getting firm numbers on the losses in this war is difficult, but the best estimates say that the Russians have lost up to twenty thousand men. Ukraine may have lost ten times that number, based on their own accounting. They started the war with about 300,000 soldiers. They have had multiple mobilizations over the last year and they now say they have 200,000 soldiers. Then you have the thousands of pieces of equipment Ukraine has lost, which is why they need new equipment.
The question that naturally arises is why is the mass media unanimously repeating this latest batch of fantasy tales? There must be people inside these organizations who know what is happening in Ukraine. There have to be plenty of generals that could explain the idiocy of sending modern tanks to Ukraine. There has to be someone working at these places who can use the internet and check this stuff. Yet, it is an amen chorus across the English speaking media.
The standard argument is that this is intended to keep the people in the dark about this latest bloody boondoggle. The trouble with that is the media hates the people and takes pleasure in mocking the rubes. The people in charge certainly have no concern with public opinion. If they wanted to sway public opinion, they would return to the old model of mock debates in which their preferred side looked the best. This was the Cold war model and it worked reasonably well.
Instead, we get something closer to Soviet media model. Colonel Douglas Macgregor went off script early on and was sent packing. He now does YouTube shows with other former cable employees who went off-script. In other words, it is not just that the media sings with one voice now. They are enforcing the narrative on their own people. Is it fear of the secret police minders in their ranks? Is it access journalism? Are we simply seeing the full blossoming of the hive mind?
Maybe all of those things play a role, but there may be something else going on that reaches beyond the mass media. Across the managerial class, we keep seeing confusion between narrative and reality. Someone produces a pleasing explanation for something and everyone jumps on it. That narrative to explain some vexing event becomes reality. In other words, in this increasingly insular world, narrative has replaced reality as the standard of truth.
Every system has a selection pressure. A system is rules and the rules favor some things and disfavor other things. Over time, the favored things will increase and the disfavored things will decrease. If you live in a system disconnected from reality, like the political-media complex, the rules can also be disconnected from reality. The resulting selection pressure can favor that which is odds with reality. Over time, you get more unreality and less reality.
Given that this is a human system, it means the system has been selecting for people who favor unreality over reality. Over time, it ceases to be a competition around specific reality but reality itself. The people who prefer spinning and embracing fantasy get rewarded while those stubbornly clinging to reality are boiled off. We may have reached the point where unreality is the benchmark. The story that is most pleasing and least truthful is what wins the fitness battle.
Another good example of this is Covid. During the panic, the mass media was like a murmuration of starlings, darting from one fanciful story to the next. The whopper that best flattered the people inside the media bubble was the winner. It was if there was a contest to see who could come up with the most ridiculous claim. That may have been what was happening. The selection pressure for unreality drives these people to the most fanciful narratives.
Whatever you favored explanation, we have reached a point where the mass media is mostly self-parody. If you want to know what is happening in the world, you are best to ignore the mass media. Maybe you start there in order to first find out what is not happening in the world. At least you narrowed the possibilities. Otherwise, our media is not even propaganda. It is a weird game of make believe designed to please the people inside who seek a life of unreality.
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Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Unreality System
The unreality is the assumption that escalation only works for the West. Boris Johnson said Putin will never use nukes. Globohomo assumes Putin won’t respond to attacks on Moscow, on Crimea, on the massive Spring/Summer offensive that the tanks, now F-16s and US/Polish troops will conduct towards Moscow. Its already telegraphed and signaled to everyone that this is the plan — invade Russia in the Spring/Summer by NATO.
Since NATO is in fact at war with Russia, the only Russian response is to fight back, in theory all the way to the Channel or the West Coast of Ireland. That is where we are headed and that war is likely to be global in nature. It is folly and stupidity to think that War somehow has become something that happens to third world peoples far away and that its always 1991 and the Russians are just like Saddam’s Soldiers in the Highway of Death. Technology, culture, demographics all change. Blitzkrieg with two pairs matched with ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) means a storm of rockets, artillery, bombs, and mortars can rain down on any group not heavily sheltered. With massive losses. And swarms of missiles and drones can take out power grids, water supplies, and transport systems like roads, railway junctions, the like. At some point attacks on Moscow and Crimea will trigger counter-attacks on Ramstein and Hampton Roads. And perhaps more.
The Pentagon is planning a massive increase in artillery and missile production. But where are they going to get the workers, the factories, the supplies? Europe is now introducing bugs (crickets and cockroaches) into its food, officially. Who will work for a bowl of bugs? When said factory will be a target? And while Denmark is drafting women now, the supply of White men willing to fight and die for Drag Queens in every Russian Kindergarten is vanishingly small.
It’s as if the old adage about the opposition having a strategy as well.
Sun Zhu?
I think that was Mike Tyson
Then it changes once they get punched.
Every boxer has the prefect game plan right up until he gets smacked in the nose.
Sun Tzu’s most appropriate (although many apply) is probably: If you know yourself and know your enemy, you need not fear 100 battles. If you know yourself but not your enemy, you will lose half your battles. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will lose very battle. (Paraphrasing from memory).
The last one should be “If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will lose every battle” (and likely very bigly).
I keep saying it-
GAE reinstituting the draft for WW3 is going to be the most epic comedy goldmine of all time.
TWGH: “GAE reinstituting the draft for WW3 is going to be the most epic comedy goldmine of all time.”
I’d like to think that would invoke CW-II, but this emerging Normie-cum-NPC personality type hasn’t yet been tested to such an extreme.
Can the Frankfurt School & the Deep State mesmerize & hypnotize the Boomer/Xer grillers into sending their precious 1.75/1.25 children off to the meat-grinder of Ukraine, never to be seen again?
I’d like to think the answer would be a resounding, “Oh Hell No!!!”
But we don’t yet have enough data points about this emerging Normie-cum-NPC personality type to know for certain whether forced conscription would cause the personality type to snap.
Or maybe the Frankfurt School & the Deep State think they can dumb down the smart weapons to the point that all only kneegr0wz and messicanz would need to suffer the casualties?
So that the flag-draped-coffins being sent home to the USA would be like watching the evening newscast in Chicago or El Paso?
Battle Beagle:
“Going to be Hilarious seeing Bradly’s and Blackhawks in combat footage being driven by russians.”
I read somewhere today that Ru$$ia is negotiating with the camel jockeys in Afghanistan for the stuff left behind
Wouldn’t surprise me a bit
Why go that far? Transporting the stuff will be a logistical nightmare.
The ultra corrupt Ukes will sell them everything NATO and Uncle Sam ships over for a hefty discount. And delivered free right where they want it.
And the Z will go begging for more.
Great post today!
For me, I start with this: Whatever the media is saying, I know it’s a lie and the opposite is most likely the truth. As much as I dislike media figures due to their sociopathy and generally evil tendencies, I don’t hate them nearly as much as the NPCs who drink the koolaid. My hatred for these people is beyond all repair and I have no interest in trying to “save” them, reason with them or convert them to our side. I simply want them removed from the society I am living in.
After the last 6 years or so, nobody has any excuses left for believing The Narrative
“Stay home, wear your mask, take the jab, be safe…”
All I heard was,
“Buy ammo, get in shape, know who your friends are and go to church (one that never closed and didn’t put hand sanitizer next to the baptismal font).”
I miss the weekly world news, Bat boy and cheerleaders abducted by aliens stories were far more credible than propaganda spewed by corporate “news”
Digital equivalent of bird cage liner.
Who wants to save the NPCs? They are the problem, without whom the elites would have no sheep over whom to rule and no thugs to staff Antifa and BLM. These flotsam are dangerous, and they must be dealt with one way or another.
The Guatemalans have a saying: “To eliminate rabies, you kill the dog.”
Mike Whitney just made a convincing argument a Russian victory in this phase of the war won’t solve anything.
I tend to agree. Even if Russia takes all of Ukraine NATO will just try to bait Russia from Poland to elicit a response that permits declaration of Article 5.
The only way out of this that doesn’t seem to lead to thermonuclear war is the surgical deletion of a certain clan that is pushing this madness.
Like all sociopaths, the Neocon cabal has told us their plans to intensify the unease. They have said quite plainly the goal is to weaken Russia and keep it occupied 24/7. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Ukraine or Ukrainians and everything to do with the master plan of the most evil people to have authority since Stalin’s gang gave up the ghost.
Webb is right, but anyone who listened to the lunatics knew as much. A good guess is the Neocons will try to arm a constant insurgency if Russia declares victory and moves to consolidate power in the territories it has taken.
The fly in the ointment is NATO solidarity. Cracks are widening and only a mild winter has kept them from becoming canyons. As horrible as it will be, an easy prediction is NATO will be deployed in European countries to quell civil unrest. People will die in those confrontations, too. This is Bizarro World East Bloc stuff.
“Like all sociopaths, the Neocon cabal has told us their plans to intensify the unease. They have said quite plainly the goal is to weaken Russia and keep it occupied 24/7.”
Agreed. I can’t remember where I read this, but didn’t Zelensky, Great Britain, and Germany all publicly state that NO peace treaty would be negotiated with Russia until Putin is removed from office and put on trial as a war criminal? This would tell me that peace is the very last thing they want, as the Russkies are simply not going to do that.
As for me, I can literally think of two-dozen people here in ‘murica (off the top of my head) whom I would prefer to die before I can think of a single Russian that I want dead.
Incidentally, I like that Maria Zakharova; she’s terrific.
Jack Dobson: “the master plan of the most evil people to have authority since Stalin’s gang gave up the ghost.”
Why do you speak ill of Saint Joseph Djugashvili?
Saint Joseph emptied the House on the Embankment, which had been the palace of “the most evil people”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_on_the_Embankment
Saint Joseph even hunted Bronstein, and drove an ice pick through its skull.
Боже, Царя храни!
God Save the Vohzd!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-e5KwphvVA
Since the Diasporas from the times of Titus and Trajan every singe nation that allowed that “certain clan” to reside there eventually expelled them one way or another. This “certain clan” is a pestilence upon the human race, an enemy of all that is good and noble and clean. They are the “whitewashed tombs”, “broods of scorpions” and “sons of Lucifer” as noted 2000 years ago.
Everything the media is saying now about the “game over for Russia” tanks going into the Ukraine, the media said about HIMARS, about the Ukraine offensive in the fall, the bridge blowing up, Snake Island, Ghost of Kiev, about everything. The media is purely the propaganda arm of the intelligence agencies, which of course include the DOD intelligence apparatus. They have these techniques they have been developing since Operation Mockingbird and they are implementing them along with new ones focused on social media (see: NAFO on twitter).
I think that this was institutionalized with Obama, actually. During the neocon wars of choice, there was actually some reporting and criticism. There was criticism on the wars, the internecine conflicts that were triggered, the failed attempts at state building, the warrantless wiretapping, the FBI setting up Muslims to arrest them later, all that stuff. Of course you could argue that the media did this because it was Bush and they didn’t like him, but Obama got into office and made it all bipartisan. So now they couldn’t actually criticize Hopey-Changey for going against his campaign promises, even if they wanted to. So they just went along with it, and were amply rewarded with a CIA/DOD pipeline.
130 years ago the media was spewing the same bullshit over the war on Spain.
That people believe the media wasn’t always corrupt is astonishing.
A LOT of the groupthink in the media today can be traced to the fact that it has become almost completely feminized and homosexualized.
The old media of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was mostly comprised of chain-smoking, hard-drinking, cynical white guys. Guys like David Brinkley and John Chancellor were the real deal. Even Dan Rather was a serious reporter in his early years.
Now they’re all a bunch of narcissistic bimbos chirping away about COVID or “climate change” like a bunch of schoolgirls. If you want to be on camera, you’ve got to be part of the girls’ clique.
“The old media of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was mostly comprised of chain-smoking, hard-drinking, cynical white guys.”
The stereotype of the hard-ass reporter with a fifth in his desk drawer and a cloud of cigarette or cigar smoke around his head didn’t spring out of nowhere. In the past reporting was a blue collar job and you got deserved abuse from an editor who worked his way up the ranks from cub reporter to boss. He’d look at your story, grab a pen, edit it and throw it back at you snarling “This is crap! Rewrite it!” 😡
(J. Jonah Jameson didn’t pop out of nowhere either)
Places like the Chicago’s City News Bureau chewed up and spit out the weak and lazy.
Personally I blame Woodward and Bernstein. Their self aggrandizing over “Bringing Down the President” meant every idiot wanted to go to school to become “A Journalist”. 🧐
A reporter?!? Ick! 😖 A Journalist “Changes The World” sir. A reporter just writes.
This garbage infests everything. I’m job hunting right now and keep encountering these companies with web pages full of virtue signalling nonsense about “changing the world” or even “saving the world”. Really xirlz? You’re a business. You have one fucking job – make more than you spend. Get back to work assholes. And you xirlz, make me a pot of coffee and get me a sandwich!
It’s all so disgusting. These people all deserve to be worked to death in a Russian prison camp.
Correction: they need to be worked to death in a prison camp on our soil, guarded by us.
Every corporate (and government) HR department has a web page that basically says “Straight white men need not apply.”
And then there is the nudge factor. It doesn’t help the media’s sense of reality/unreality when one ethnic group is intent on weakening the deepest foundations of our civilization and turn it into a banana republic.
Excellent. Continues to be worth my $4.99/month. Concerning the covid “pandemic”, maybe you’ve read that Seattle/King County is struggling to store all the Fentanyl corpses tinyurl.com/2e6ogcwe . I know someone who worked in downtown Seattle throughout 2020 and 2021 and is not aware of any problem with storing the covid corpses.
“our media is not even propaganda. It is a weird game of make believe designed to please the people inside who seek a life of unreality.”
Yes. I would add: the unreality they are seeking is their meekist utopia in which all the suffering people of the world get to live a nice life with a gravel drive and a gazebo. That’s their simple motivation. They have in mind a little girl sitting in the dirt in an adobe hut clutching a rag doll and they’re in agony about it. Really. Their compassion is like an illness they need to salve. They think ‘we’ve got room, we’ve got riches to spare, let her come and live here.’ Only they then have to extend that to everyone in the third world, and extend the principle to everyone everywhere they perceive as victims (now including the Ukrainians). They haven’t yet seen the logical problem with that as they are blinded by their compassion. This is the root of it. It is the basis of everything we talk about in this forum.
By the way, this is one of the reasons I still don’t believe in the ‘elites’ who are organising things secretly to enhance their own power. The other reason is that I don’t think there are enough people who are that clever. Compassion is the path to power nowadays, and while there are no doubt a few who cynically game the system, I submit that leftists are genuinely led by compassion and, being ruled by emotion over reason, have thereby taken leave of their senses.
I think this is a valuable insight. I think this may be the psychology of a significant percentage of the mentally ill on the left who fight against their own interest and their children’s very existence.
That said, there is clearly a sinister element that is committed to keeping them corralled by always having to fear social ostracization and loss of livelihood should thoughts of their own self interest ever enter their mind.
There is too much documented evidence that replacement migration was planned, who planned and advocated for it, why they did it, what factions are enlisted to support it for short term concerns and even how those who push it may need to start considering how it might affect their group interest in the negative. When those concerns are discussed the concerns of white Gentiles are never considered as potential partners. In fact, they are never mentioned.
Your point helps us to remember to have understanding and patience for those suffering from NIMBY compassion. We must never forget however, they are the tools of people who have very bad intentions for all of us.
I should have closed with the line: what we’re dealing with here is not cunning but emotion. Today’s piece tries to account for the delusions of the media by means of a massive conspiracy theory. I would say: never attribute anything to conspiracy that can be adequately explained by human nature.
A couple problems. First, animals are trained based on their nature, but who can deny that the trainer is ruling over them. Francis Bacon said it best, “To command nature one must follow the rules of nature.” I would argue this, first, applies to the populace. Two, I see no compassion, except briefly exhaled as a signaling device, for those at the top. How did they get to the top? Did they cut the throat of every opponent based on compassion? You cannot get to the top except by being ruthless. Further, I would suggest that the truly elite are largely hidden. In the era where privacy is the exception for most, wouldn’t the exceptional be exceptionally private?
If I am on a desert island, and I see a computer was up, I may not see the hand that manufactured it, but I know it is manufactured. Same with animals penned up in a field. Same with the eloi populace.
“They have in mind a little girl sitting in the dirt in an adobe hut clutching a rag doll and they’re in agony about it.”
Darker possibility: they see the image of the girl and wonder why she isn’t in their back yard, why the nagging sense of injustice in daily life. So, like cheap Chinese goods, they import her.
Even darker possibility: there’s a real, but unspoken, need for exploitation.
But! She must always, always be beneath them.
Anson writes, “I submit that leftists are genuinely led by compassion and, being ruled by emotion over reason, have thereby taken leave of their senses.”
I agree and have always found the phrase “pathological compassion” a useful shorthand for what you describe.
I don’t mind disagreeing with smart people like Anson about the degree to which we are ruled by a hostile ethnic elite. It’s a murky and difficult question and people of good will can differ. To me, the controlling ownership of the media since WW2 by a certain group and the anti-traditional white trajectory of the media since then is sufficient circumstantial proof for me.
From my perspective, the pathological compassion that only whites have, generally speaking, is one of their primary tools in subjugating us.
A thought…
Don’t allow your compassion to overmaster you, and waste it on those totally undeserving of your reflexive tendencies as a fundamentally forgiving person.
Similarly with all of those people who wanted to see jab refusers disadvantaged, ostracized, and yes, even put into camps or prisons. They will never have the benefit of my forgiveness, because they do not deserve it; their wistful, vapid probing for this to be extended to them is merely an extension of the unprincipled mutability of their worldview and of their conduct governed thereby. It was always and only self-serving, and their non-apology apology just makes it all the worse to bear.
Real, ineradicable damage was done; people lost careers and businesses, and people could not tend to their loved ones in their final days. My brother in laws’ wife had to let her mother die alone, something that need not have been were it not for these hateful people.
So much for their compassionate natures.
Pathological compassion is great way to describe it. It often leads to being easily manipulated into supporting taking some action even if that action makes no sense, won’t improve things, or can even make things worse. You see this a lot with calls for banning guns for everyone after a mass shooting. Or throwing more funding at schools when performance sucks – giving no attention to teacher/administrator ratio, composition of the students, parental involvement, the actual curricula, etc.
There is some genuine compassion. There is a lot more virtue signaling.
I direct you to the greatest meme of all time
http://www.danielgarciaart.com/product/your-own-prsonal-slaves/
That may be the key to what makes altruism pathological: how else, then, can they elevate themselves?
Thus, the thought of consequences never enters their minds. The problem they’re working on is not the problem stated. The other side of projection.
The rulers aren’t led by any sense of compassion, and will always direct the system back to a slave economy as much as possible. The useful idiots of power like the idea of compassion, they want to regard themselves as compassionate, but they are enabled to take the cheap and easy aspartame version of compassion supply where they show up to a sanctioned liberal riot with their pussy hat on.
Also remember that the true believers of liberalism are simply animals to the same extent as the brown mass. Their only use is to be manipulated to serve their superiors. Our problem is obviously that the wrong sorts of superiors have control of the great braying witless hordes.
I opened Michael Anton’s latest blog post entitled, ” Farewell to Z-Man!
Once More on the Question of Natural Right.” At the end of the first paragraph he wrote this regarding your recent post on the same subject: “…the Z-Man has lashed out wildly.”
I read no further. The idea “false in one thing, false in all things” applies here.
I know Anton’s statement to be false, and I decided not to waste my time reading further.
Bill C/ Sarasota
At some point, Z-man needs to let go and stop involving himself with correcting lessor people on their conceptual *error*. Such squabbles detract from greater goals. As the saying goes, “You should not wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.”
For all the fireworks, the argument between Anton and Z regarding the first principles of conservatism is the the most important discussion we can have right now. Before we can effectively challenge the neoliberal hegemony, we must sort things amongst ourselves.
It’s the same argument that’s been going on for years, heck, decades. Some of us on the Right believe that institutions are downstream from culture which is downstream from biology.
Some on the Right (colorblind CivNats) believe that biology doesn’t matter, that culture (and incentives) is spring from which everything flows. In this regard, colorblind CivNats are no different from the Left. They both agree that race doesn’t matter. They only disagree on why there are different outcomes with the Left blaming white racism and CivNats blaming culture or incentives.
You either accept nature and her rules or you don’t. Colorblind CivNats and the Left don’t. We do.
Citizen: Excellent distillation of the hard right position. Or “Why it’s a waste of time talking to leftists or civnats or pseudo HBD ethnots.”
I would simply add, however, that Civnats may be educated, or redpilled, if you prefer. Leftists, generally, cannot. Hence, the importance of the debate.
My own enlightenment, and I expect that of many, here and elsewhere, proceeded along such lines.
Here’s the problem with the “hard right” take as you describe it: Exceptions exist. The CivNats use that to “discredit” HBD. Now, any reasonable person will realize that yes, exceptions exist, but that does not discredit anything. You can’t design your society by catering to exceptions. It’s why airline seats are the size they are – any smaller, and not enough passengers would fit in the seat; much larger and same problem – you couldn’t seat enough passengers to justify the flight. It’s also why basketball players average 6’5″ – the occasional dunking 5’9″er doesn’t significantly impact it.
It is again the classic nature/nurture debate extrapolated from the individual to the group. Both sides should acknowledge (1) some nurture is involved, (2) some nature is involved, (3) exceptions do exist but you can’t build a society on exceptions. Where CivNats go wrong is placing far too much weight on nurture. Maybe not quite as much weight as their progressive friends, but probably closer to them than Race Realists. IMHO, if you build a society based on White culture and values, and some random POC fits in, so be it. But no advantages should be given to force fit POCs (or worse, excuse their not fitting in).
Agree, but I’d say some nurture is involved, but mostly nature is involved.
Generalizations apply ….. Generally.
That’s my answer to ones voicing the problem of exceptions.
UsnThem, my gut feel is around 70/30 nature/nurture, if not higher nature.
Anton cries out in agony as he maligns you.
Shame, I had a lot of positive feelings for Anton because of the Flight 93 Election column. Oh well, he can’t change or grow.
I think he got as much good will from that one column that any man should expect.
Jebus.
It’s fine for Anton to stop engaging, but screaming at the top of his lungs “I’m not engaging anymore!!!…now let me get the last word” is passive aggressive in the extreme.
What a loser.
He seemed a bit hysterical – throwing around (among others) terms like hatred, fury, foaming at the mouth, invective etc. Gad, it was another long slog – guy is wordy as all hell.
Most news feeds today are one step above the old “National Enquirer” headlines, remember those? “Bat Boy says aliens from Mars kidnapped his mother!!!”
That was the Weekly World News, a “downmarket” satirical publication that the ’80s cloud people didn’t understand and treated as a direct lens into the hive-mind of the dirt people.
WWN’s most viral invention was “Elvis sightings.” All the standup comics had a “Why do aliens only kidnap these *losers*?” bit; it was the WWN who ruralized the paranormal. Etc. Every English-speaking person today believes things—harbors mental archetypes—that the batboy guys made up, because those things, if taken as real, condemned the already-condemned and flattered the already-flattered. That is, as Z notes, memetic fitness.
The Enquirer is the celebrity gossip paper that never lies. For decades they’ve been angry that people credit them with the batboy/Elvis/redneck anal probe stuff.
When the Enquirer went after Hillary was when they started putting it behind a plastic thing at the checkout counter so you couldn’t see the cover. I can’t be the only one who noticed.
No, no you weren’t. I remember Dan Rather getting scooped by the Enquirer when the Berlin Wall came down. Rather was moving above the crowd in the bucket of a cherry picker, dressed in a Barbour Jacket and waving his hands around.
Down in the crowd, a crew from the Enquirer walked up to this monster of a West-German guy who was slinging a sledge hammer at the wall. He stopped and turned to see a small kid standing behind him cheering and smiling. The guy then offered the kid the sledge hammer and that’s the pic that was snapped by the Enquirer’s photographer, which was subsequently on the cover of every paper for the next week.
Great story, The Enquirer also broke the John Edwards mistress story that derailed his attempt to run for President in 2008.
The current rulers had enough grasp of reality to exempt themselves from compulsory medical experimentation… and that’s the most generous framing you could put on it at this point. Just one example among many that tend to prove they don’t believe the lies they articulate and that their behavior is better explained by willful evil than insanity.
Direct TV (AT & T) removed OneAmerica News from their package, and now another conservative news organization is being removed, from DISH I suppose? Why bother installing government reporters when you can use threats from the FCC to get rid of entire stations?
It was Newsmax. Newsmax wouldn’t even talk about the steal in 2020 and was at best controlled opposition owned a Clinton buddy. No great loss.
by a Clinton buddy I meant
I think a lot of the hive people’s reaction comes down to the hysterical state they are always in. When I say “they,” I mean most people – regardless of media or not. These hyperbolic states, either very low or very high, mean they are perpetually agitated. Thus, when something offends them, they overreact. Further, when something excites their belief system, they overreact. Now, I do believe orders come down from on high – either directly or indirectly. But the visceral reactions the average person, particularly in the media, experiences is the act of people in perpetual agitation. That state also prevents reflection, which would point out the folly of this belief and a recognition of how many times the “salvation” of Ukraine is at hand.
I’m pretty sure the state of constant hysteria in the collective West is an intentional outcome from the decades long effort to feminize Western societies.
Covid confirms this.
I agree with you here. I too feel there is direction coming from somewhere, otherwise how do you explain the extreme synchronization.
Now I know I’m going down a rabbit hole here, but stay with me…the highs & lows / hyperbolic outrage state is core to manufacturing consent and driving adherence to narrative. A la MKUltra where they used hallucinogens and trama to create unreality enough to mold minds they have found a much more useful tool in mass media through the television and smart phone. It is instantly in front of your face and constantly telling you to ignore the immediate reality around you for some one else version of it (or hyper-reality). “News” is no longer the facts of the matter, but the talking heads’ reaction, 1200 info graphics, a parade of ‘experts’, and appeals to authority of big gov. Sure, there’s some facts there sometimes, but the presentation is the message and it’s meant to keep people slingshoting high & low to manipulate most people into agreeing with whatever is said.
No need to ask me to go down with you – I am already there. I completely believe in Monarch/ MK programming. I also believe in processing of the populace as a whole alchemically. I believe in induced dissociation, particularly in children, to make industry slaves through multiple personality disorder. But, most sigh and close their eyes at these points, so I try to walk a line. But, yes, right with you!
Cruising through the open Fediverse feed I’m constantly surprised by the number of posters who should be institutionalized; servers full of people who should be in the loony bin. These are people who have gone way beyond “eccentric” or “weird” into a a mess of mental instability exacerbated by poor self-maintenance and consumption of pharmaceuticals that either didn’t exist 30 years ago, or would have never been prescribed by a doctor of any worth. Nine times out of ten someone is paying these head cases to show up for a job.
Are you speaking of online personas? Having lived around DC much of my life, I recall a couple of comments by friends who actually worked downtown. A high school buddy’s dad worked many EPA contracts. Mr. X once said something like “20% of the employees there are certifiably mentally ill.” This was perhaps around 1980. I thought he was just exaggerating. He was quite eccentric himself. But ten years later I had been through a military enlistment and 16 years as a contractor. I’d seen some of this first-hand (but in different agencies.) Another friend, a lifer in another Federal agency said of unwanted employees: it was impossible to fire them, so the best that could be done was transfer the troublemaker elsewhere.
Great post. It does seem that this Hivemind has spread everywhere though. I’m old enough to have attended university where one class was taught by a hardcore Marxist who believed the USSR would win the Cold War, followed by a class taught by a blood and soil conservative. Both types are long gone — all academics are now sad little Wokesters saying the exact same thing.
The downside of all this is that these idiots could easily lead us into World War III, because the adults all appear to have left the building…
The empire of free money is able to spread it around to control media. That’s not “conspiracy theory,” you can look up how much the regime paid them to push covid propaganda. You think that’s the only time the regime ever did that?
I get the sense that so called “conservative” or “alt” media or whatever it’s called is just as controlled as the “legacy” media. When I look at “independent” “conservative” web sites they mostly seem to run the same stories. Maybe it’s just my imagination. Maybe the Daily Wire really does generate sufficient revenue on its own to offer somebody like Steven Crowder a $50 million contract.
The pipeline that sends new “talent” to Big Media is now so refined that Mockingbird must not be left with very much to do. The new hires show up pre-indoctrinated. Seems to have pretty well become the case in local media as well. Any wrongthink that still gets through is quickly weeded out. The wannabe cloud viewership has become so well trained that they call them out for cancellation the moment they stray, making Mockingbird redundant again.
Ukraine war propaganda doesn’t have anything on WWII propaganda, but it’s the closest thing since. Which could be considered a piece of evidence that this is WWIII and not just another goatherder war.
I don’t see how the math adds up for things like the Daily Wire except they have a funding source that doesn’t expect a profit. In fact, I thing it would be a major suprise if there was one. We have all these people coming from nowhere who are too young and inexperienced in the world to possibly have anything to contribute to anything but are promoted as such great thinkers and experts.
Sometimes you just have to believe in the conspiiracy theories, they’re teh only ones that make sense.
I have been puzzling over that as well. They offered Crowder $50 million over four years. That is $12.5 million per year. Presumably, Crowder is making less than that as a solo act. What is the daily Wire doing for the Crowder show to increase its revenue to the point where they can pay him $12.5 million per year and make a profit?
Presumably they sell ads. Are we supposed to believe that Crowder can increase the sales of those advertisers by some number bigger than $12.5 million a year? That seems unlikely. If that were true, they could call him up and offer to advertise on his show. Why would they need the Daily Wire to facilitate this?
I can tell you, I get hit with requests to run ads here every week. Some are generic banner type ad deals, but some are agents for actual companies looking to place ads. I know how it will end so I decline the offer, but if they are contacting me then they are contacting the big YouTube guys.
There is a piece to this puzzle that is missing.
They’ll pay him $12.5M to say what they want him to say, and since they’ll run his social media accounts, they don’t even need to ask him.
I guess it will be interesting to see if this was an “offer he couldn’t refuse” and he gets run in to homelessness for not being under the umbrella of the Fake Right.
Outing this kind of stuff would be good, because the thing that generally keeps me from donating to content producers is that they invariably get outed as being multimillionaires while they’ve been endlessly crying about how desperately they need me to donate because of youtube ads, sick cat, third grandma just died, etc.
Right now middle class slobs actually have to think about whether or not to buy eggs, it’s pretty parasitic and slimy to hornswaggle them into thinking that buying a youtuber a mansion will help “the cause”.
Z: “There is a piece to this puzzle that is missing.”
Clearly Jerome Powell’s interest rate hikes have decimated Amazon & Google & Facebook.
And there’s even news that Bezos is in so much trouble financially that he’s preparing to sell the Washington Post.
Without the free flow of fake money, it’s hard to imagine that the free flow of fake advertising will also persist.
So either advertising is about to crash, or else this really is a Holy War for the Khazarians, and they’re willing to bust open their own precious piggy*** banks in order to finance the advertising for the Holy War.
==========
***How do you make kosher piggy bank?
***How do you make a kosher piggy bank?
“Once you eliminate all other possibilities, what remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth.”
Once the ukrainicide is sufficient, the land shall become the inheritance of the starlings of david.
Maybe, but they really wanted the good parts that Vlad is sitting on. The “Uke Stub” is just going to be Israel with worse weather and neighbors throwing rabble from around the planet over their border.
After the evil Saddam made the mistake of taking April Glaspie seriously and invaded Kuwait, the Sunday morning news shows featured big debates between the “liberals”, the “conservatives”, and everything inbetween. You had one clown calling for carpet bombing of Iraq, another wanting surgical strikes on Saddam’s palaces, another wanted the Green Berets to go in and get Saddam. We saw similar “debates” over Vietnam. Everyone involved wanted some sort of intervention. Every solution involved the American government “doing something” to solve the problem.
At no time did I hear or read about anyone saying that none of it was any of our business. So, one way or another, the USA was going to be involved, and they were going to be dropping bombs on or shooting someone. And it was all going to be extremely profitable for someone else.
Yes, that was the “range” of views permitted, even in the old days.
Such is the hubris stemming from wealth and power (perceived at least). Vietnam calmed us down until Reagan “brought us back” with a silly little “ginned up” intervention in Grenada. Then onto another faux power, Iraq. Bush I—thanks to Reagan’s fantastic military buildup—placed 500k soldiers in Saudi to put down a 3rd rate power. Bush II only needed 120k military to later invade and take over the entire country.
A Ukrainian debacle will teach us nothing. It *will* take a major tête-à-tête with Russia or China for the lesson to be learned and remembered.
Hopefully, there will be enough American involement hardware wise that some of the less retarded will see what would happen to the vaunted American war machine in a peer battle. A big enough defeat will result in our elites being hunted in the streets and they will try to avoid that. There are many of them that know how much they are hated so hopefully they will back off or be tld to back off.
Yeah I had the same thought that, for as much I want to side with Z and blame the Clintons, the unanimity in regards to GW1 was something to behold. I read Newsweek at the time and I don’t recall one anti-war piece, and CNN made bank on their war-tv coverage.
Evil Sandmich: Agreed. I spent the majority of 1980-1994 overseas, and my left-to-right political trajectory occurred during that time period. While I was never a big tv watcher I did regularly read the paper and some news periodicals, and I can’t say that I recall any sort of balanced presentation of anything during that time. Granted, my reading material was limited during my few domestic years to the Washington Post – and then overseas to the International Herald Tribune and government cables – and my listening was the BBC.
But even as a young new conservatard I could see the massive imbalance, having come from the rabid left side, and it long predated the Clintons coming on the scene. I recall various political discussions in grad school preceding the 1984 election and I was part of a small minority – which included many of the overseas students, including Africans – who openly preferred Reagan. Even when we were overseas and Clinton got elected, my husband’s disbelief and disgust was not widely shared among embassy staff – even those more openly conservatively inclined.
Excellent essay and I think it gets to the heart of the issue, the ruling class and increasingly a large part of the population now lives in its own narrative and it’s own reality.
We live in a world of narratives.
Blacks don’t commit more crime than other races.
Men can be women.
Women can be men.
The Ukraine can defeat Russia.
Just some of the narratives we must endure now.
At least with Galileo he was only attacked for that one belief about the earth and the sun with us it’s multiple false beliefs and narratives that our cathedral holds.
Yes!
This reminds me of a talk Jared Taylor gave at a black college where he made a point to a student who attacked him during the Q and A. The student, a black female, brought up the “hands up, don’t shoot” situation in Ferguson. Everyone knows that was a complete lie, but she refused to believe it. His point to her that it is impossible to co-exist when an event happens and blacks will see one thing while the rest of us see what actually happened.
This is exactly the same thing with St. Floyd. Those who live in reality saw another violent negro resisting arrest, acting out on drugs and committing crime. Then we saw him die of a drug overdose. Those who choose to see their own “truth” saw a murder. Only one of those two options is real, but in a society where your feelings supersede truth and reality, this is completely accepted and celebrated. Those who saw the truth are just racists who need to be eliminated.
Tired Citizen: It is always thus with non-Whites. Consider the most recent Oriental mass shootings. An Oriental female reporter wrote about the implicit ‘White racism’ in noting that both shooter and victim were from “our (her) people” as somehow diminishing what she considers a massive nationwide tragedy. Even such an open declaration of ethnic distinctiveness is insufficient for everyone else to acknowledge that no, “we” are NOT all ‘murricans and we don’t experience the same reality. Same at pseudo HBD sites where an oriental commenter will without fail chime in on any issue involving his people while simultaneously insisting he and his hapa children are more American than heritage Americans, or a jevvish commenter will never fail to insert his ‘expert’ opinion any time other jevvs are mentioned.
Even when the occasional commenter or reporter calls these sort of people out for their ethnocentrism, they continue to deny any such feelings and continue to push the White guilt and/or the “nation of immigrants” lies. Carried to its logical extreme, this mythic universalism demands mourning the death of an alien child on an alien shore with as much grief as a mother would mourn the death of her own White child at home. It actually requires she mourn the alien even more than her own, because of ‘historically marginalized” and “White privilege.” It’s Satanic.
Derb has his hopes of an arctic alliance of whites and asians. Sailer has his hopes of transracial high IQ nationalism.
I wonder if the relish with which asians turn to hating white people, even when all the attackers of asians are black, will make an impression on them.
I imagine that they will make the argument that the asians have been incentivized to hate whites in the same way that many of our white upper class have. They could be right, I’m not sure. But why take the risk?
Line: Agreed. I’m too wordy often enough as is, so I don’t always explain the nuance of my positions. Of course there are ‘exceptions’ amongst every populace. Of course Asians are not the same as blacks. But I’ve lived in an Asian society. While I might like/admire some individually, I don’t feel comfortable in their society corporately. The culture their genetic proclivities create may not be actively hostile to me, but neither is it natural to me. Obviously, Derbyshire has a vested interest.
I choose not to play the better/worse game (i.e. mestizos versus blacks, subcons versus han, etc.). One can always find something in common with a rare individual among an alien group. One can even base an alliance on a common enemy. But I just don’t see the point in preemptively surrendering any hope of a White future because someone has a Han wife, or because Asians aren’t generally homicidal maniacs.
A very dangerous disconnect from reality from which our elites presently suffer is the apparent belief that Russians will drop their weapons and run to the rear in terror at the first sight of an American uniform. I rather suspect the opposite is true: Russian troops will be rather pleased to finally get a shot at their tormentors, rather than at their brother Slavs. A commitment of American troops that results in a catastrophic, or even a serious defeat would raise the prospect of an even more dangerous disconnect from reality; using tactical nuclear weapons could retrieve the situation without escalating rapidly into a general nuclear exchange with tens or even hundreds of millions of dead.
I guess they haven’t seen all the footage from Syria where Russian patrols give as good as they get to GAE patrols when it comes time to needle each other.
Nuclear war has been a very real danger as a result of this disconnect. Also troubling in the bloviations from lunatics here that Russia never would use the bomb. They literally cannot fathom that people do not hold them in high regard, let alone despise them. This will be avoided only when the threat of imminent death is apprehended but the cognitive dissonance does not allow it at the moment.
Serious question: I realize the entire West has gone collectively insane, but do the French grasp how utterly unhinged it is over here? Frace may be just as bad but I rather doubt it.
Putin has stated to the world that he reserves the right to use nuke’s if Russian territorial integrity is threatened. The territory now fought over has been annexed. A nuke there will relieve Putin of any need to consult his Duma or Federation Council. It will allow a free response with theater nukes. Folks in Europe will be very unhappy since they were so unhappy with Chernoble.
The light screening forces in the yapping lap dog Baltic states and the 101st brigade in Romania will be speedbumps to the Russian army and air. Heavier forces in Poland will fair better but I wonder how they will fight without overwhelming air superiority.
Once again grammar and spellin, fare better, not fair.
I live in France and I don’t think that they appreciate how unhinged the U.S. elite is, at least partially because the French elite is little or no better. The only European country with a lick of sense is Hungary.
I wonder how many of the US elite troops are in the position that the British Hessians were in during the Revolutionary War. Many sympathized with the American cause. Not that it could affect the outcome, but it is a fun thought.
The fall of Constantinople in particular and the history of the eastern Roman Empire in general is not something that is easy to study.
That being said, I imagine the eunuchs and guards inside the walls of Constantinople lived pretty darn well until their heads were mounted on said walls.
The tank issue is a great example of this “unreality” stupor we are in. As McGregor says: “The most inappropriate tank in the entire world for this war is the Abrams.” No way to establish a supply line that includes jet fuel over about 700 miles, assuming you could manage to transport them that far.
A few commentators are even saying that these tanks, to include the leopard, are not going to the front. Most, if not all, of them will remain in Poland in reserve for a possible Polish/NATO push into Western Ukraine. There they will set up either a Rump Ukraine State or incorporate the area into Poland.
That is my sense. This is happy talk for now, but the new plan is to build a Polish army. For what purpose is unknown, but the Poles are mobilizing and they will need equipment. The thing is, Poland seizing Western Ukraine creates all sorts of trouble for Europe and the United States.
There is a reason that Churchill characterized Poland as “the greedy hyena of Europe”. This link takes one to an article about the history between Poland and Ukrainians (and other ethnic minorities, an ugly history, indeed):
https://orientalreview.org/2014/08/28/poland-and-ukraine-history-of-break-downs/
There is a reason that Bandera had lots of support for the slaughter of Poles and Jews.
There is two Polands. One is somber and sober minded. The other hysterical and irrational. We have some of the former commenting here from time to time. Right now the Polish government is dominated by the latter.
Another wrinkle is the Hungarian population in Carpathian Ruthenia. Orbon knows what the Ukrainians are doing to those Hungarians. If Poland is thinking about going to Lviv, the Hungarians may make a move to protect the Hungarian minority. Dangerous stuff.
There are Romanian ethnics to the east of the Hungarian area, and that, too, could be a flashpoint if and when rump Ukraine winds up being disarticulated.
A vexed part of Europe it is.
I think GAE wants to occupy a rump Ukraine and turn it into Kosovo so they can freeze the conflict in a stalemate and spend 3 to 5 years resting, refitting, and rearming.
The GAE tipped their hand in the stories about ramping up arms production over the next few years.
Putin and his staff should be considering scenarios focused on taking the entire Ukraine. They also ought to brainstorm ways to prompt Xi to make a move on Taiwan.
That’s my fear as well. That Poland/NATO send troops into western Ukraine under the banner of a “humanitarian” mission to help refugees or something like that.
On YouTube when I’m driving, I watch Col. MacGregor, Judge Napolitano, the Duran guys, Scott Ritter and Garland Nixon (interesting and amusing anti-war leftist). YouTube generally doesn’t censor them. But it does cough up the CNN retired generals and spooks from its algorithms, whom I sometimes watch when some bimbo host has them on. My impression is they’re just lying about Ukraine, the new superweapons, etc., to get a paycheck, from CNN and their other paymasters. They all follow the same script and their attitude is one of functionaires.
Love everybody you named, especially the Colonel. Brian Berlitec’s (sp) New Atlas is also excellent.
Possibly bored to death. The need for moar, to feel something, leading into fantasy, which turns to fear as reality punctures the bubble, which leads into more, paranoid, fantasy, and then, mercifully, the end.
No idea how accurate that is, but it’s what comes to mind.
Maybe to put too fine a point on it, going back to what I was saying about machines as slaves who don’t suffer.
It’s about the morality tale, I think. Good/bad, noble/slave, pride/shame. People need it, but machines are amoral, as is the world built with their ‘labor’. Something is missing, and it’s driving everybody nuts. Crazy narratives and inversions because why not? Labor and pain are moral, an anchor, and we’ve cut ourselves loose.
Don’t look now Zman – but ol’ M Anton over at Am. Greatness has generated pixels too numerous to read – but his bottom line is: “Whatever. I’ve spent too much time on this already and have other things to do. I hope it was useful to someone”.
Spent too much time – fer sure. Useful – not so much.
To his credit he seems to realize he is in way over his head. To his discredit his latest is incredibly dishonest.
HAHA!
From the comments:
“Wouldn’t surprise me if Z Man, like Kristol and other grifters of that ilk, isn’t getting some funding from the likes of Soros or Omidyar.”
Z-Man, say it ain’t so!
The funny part there is the editor of American Greatness used to work for the Heartland Institute, which got about 20% of its funding from Soros at one time. No one knows who bankrolls Anton and the Claremont boys.
The question of funding is interesting, especially in light of the Crowder deal, which is frankly weird. Certain people seem to be desperate to keep certain questions from being asked.
I actually think some of smarter Straussians know the game is up; they’re just collecting residuals. Fairly or not, Identity politics killed the American Creed. Sam Huntington knew that 20 years ago.
That’s a first, Zman lumped in with Kristol. Can there be more polar opposites?
The commenters at that site are dumber than Breitbart commenters, which is saying something.
Yeah, I’m always interested in the comments section of places like that. These were typical colorblind CivNat.
They boil down to “We’ll win them over with our ideas!”
But it is interesting to see how their rejection of biological differences seeps into every position. It also disarms them because they’re accepted the Left’s morality.
@CoSC
“They boil down to “We’ll win them over with our ideas!””
If we just show them one more graph or chart they will see!
One of them threw out the possibility you are getting funding from “Soros or Omidyar.” When that money comes through, you can upgrade the comment section.
Anton’s piece even got an above-the-fold mention on Ace of Grillers this morning. I’m not sure why, since I guess the average reader over there was likely unaware of the entire back and forth.
I have never understood the comment section at AoS. It is mostly random words without any context. I guess it means things to regulars, but to me it looks like random text.
It’s been around so long it mostly consists of what 4chan calls “ritualposts.” Recognizable characters say predictable things, often unrelated to the topic. In an anonymous comment section they’d end up being known as “[subject]schizo,” “[subject]anon” or “[subject]bro” depending how creative/based their shtick is. At old blogs everybody knows your name.
I was of course banned years ago for blasting the Jews (my mother).
The day I gave up AoGs was a good day. It’s a shame because they’re good on music and link great animal videos.
Yes, the mass media is corrupt and harmful rather than enlightening and useful. Yes, it is that way for the worst possible reasons. They truly enjoy deceiving the dirt people and get an ego boost from lying so brazenly with no adverse consequence. They flaunt their evil because can get away with it in the sick society that we currently inhabit.
But there is a silverlining to this madness. If you meet a stranger and want to ascertain if he/she is a member of the hive, all you have to do is ask a question about current events. The reply will quickly identify this person’s fundamental nature and enable you to react accordingly. And the ancient wisdom of this situation is that people who are divorced from reality constitute a real and present danger, and hence should be avoided at all costs. Nature intends that they evolve toward extinction and you don’t want make that journey with them.
i assume everyone i meet is part of the hive, until they do something that indicates otherwise. most (other) oldies are firmly in the grip of the msm; it is the water they swim in.
For better or worse, this cuts both ways. A cloud can spot a dirt just as easily.
Jeffrey: Not necessarily. Because I have all the requisite credentials and went the correct schools, people used to routinely assume all sorts of things about my political and social beliefs. The mere fact of international travel/work automatically translated, in their mind, to ‘cosmopolitan liberal.’
Me too, it’s fun.
Yes. But a a dirt lying to a cloud about being a cloud is fun/funny. A cloud lying to a dirt about being a dirt is beneath them. They just can’t do it (politicians excepted).
In my experience, the Cloud People are so inured to unreality that they are easily, and willfully, deceived by dirt people pretending to be “woke.” They are so thrilled to have their biases confirmed that they overlook any other clues that might reveal a dissident, such as sarcasm or a cold stare. Learning to walk among the zombies is actually a survival skill if you live in the big city.
I mean come on DeMar Hamlin at the game the other night? People are falling for this? That was not him, that was some body double that never showed his face or talk to anyone or got a picture and everyone’s just accepting that like that was real. I asked a couple friends who were big football fans and all they said was yeah that was weird but that was as far as they were going to go with it. People are participating in the insult to their intelligence and it appears to be justified.
Right?
The only frontal shot of him was from across the stadium through blowing snow flurries? In an age where 5k GoPro cameras are widely available for $400?
C’mon man!
It’s incredible! They said openly he was on oxygen and had a long recovery and then somebody in that box was practically doing jumping jacks up there. I’m gobsmacked at the widespread assent to obvious deception.
That story is turning into a trap to make people who question the narrative look like kooks. I did some checking, the reason he had that ridiculous coat on the entire game is that he is selling them as part of his clothing line ($150 if you want one). He had previously shown his entire face in screenshots from Zoom calls since the injury. Even if they did use a body double, so what? The whole story and Hamlin will be an afterthought by the time the next football season starts. There is nothing to be gained by engaging with that story.
“Even if they did use a body double, so what?”
Really?
Why do you care if he was at the game or not? What part of the regime agenda is advanced by having him attend or having a body double attend in his place? No one is ever going to be able to prove the vaccine caused his heart issues. Even if such a test existed, the NFL is never going to let it get run on him.
A growing and large number of people now think the Covid vaccine was worthless, at best. Now mainstream media is running stories claiming “it is outrageous these anti-vax kooks think Hamlin wasn’t at the game.” This is a trap to discredit people who question the narrative. You are getting played.
It’s not a trap, Its just another symptom exposing the empire of lies
If this is an op, 4D chess, a trap, whatever — then they have the entire system under lock and key, and any move is already baked into the game. And I’m talking about *any* move, even to the point of trying to point it out to others. Already anticipated. Do you really believe this?
This is the 4D chess theory, only applied to the left. I’ve heard increasingly-complicated explanations for what we can see plainly with our own eyes, almost like a child: that person is covering his face.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, you can introduce the context: well, he flatlined three weeks ago during a football game, suffered two cardiac events, and has been on oxygen and hospitalized as a result.
Then you can offer other bits of information you’ve learned as well — he’s been to the Bills training camp, he’s still on oxygen, he’s no longer on oxygen, he’s taking pictures outside in the middle of winter, he can’t expose his face because it’s winter and it’s cold, and so on.
That final category is what people are having trouble with, because covering your face from cameras after the previous three weeks — especially the contrasting information about his condition — makes absolutely no sense. At least from the perspective of “this is him, but why is he doing this?” There aren’t any reasonable, non-nefarious answers to this, and yours (he’s selling coats) doesn’t measure up. His clothing line isn’t going to be harmed by showing his face. I’m sure Michael Jordan didn’t need to mask up to sell his sneakers.
They wouldn’t have had a body double attend with the long term plan of discrediting anti-vaccine people. They would have done that for positive PR, to fire up the crowd, etc. Once the appearance started to get questioned, then they went all in with the, “you people are anti-vax kooks” response. It isn’t 4-D chess, they are reacting to people questioning it online and trying to spin.
Hamlin did show his face in the hospital on screen shots taken from Zoom calls. Who knows why this hood rat is covering his face other times. My point is this story is a waste of time and it will be more effective to get normies to question the regime by focusing on other stories that have hard data.
Who are you trying to look not crazy for? You live in a looney bin. When the inmates call you crazy you really shouldn’t worry about it.
They’re not doing it to “discredit anti-vaccine people.” They’re doing it to guard against having to deal with the issue of vaccine damage to a player until after the Super Bowl.
I live in WNY, so this is widely discussed. Yesterday I was having a conversation with our engineering and safety managers and they became very agitated over suggestions that it wasn’t Hamlin. “Why, people who think that are flat-earthers and don’t believe the moon landing either!” I remarked that I just thought the entire spectacle was odd, to say the least. Beyond that, I have no idea what the truth is.
This led to the engineer scoffing at anyone who thinks it was the clot shot that caused Hamlin’s problems. I gently disputed this saying it was reasonable to at least ask that question. I then inquired as to the whereabouts of Bills/Sabres owner Kim Pegula, who hasn’t been seen in 7 months. He then claimed to have a contact at Buffalo General Hospital who told him she’d suffered a massive stroke and is essentially toast.
Just like that he went from disputing any issue with the vexx to calmly discussing the fact that a very healthy and super-wealthy 53 year old woman was made a vegetable by a sudden cardiac event. I’ve known this guy for much of my life, he was Salutatorian of his H.S. class when that still meant something. He’s no dummy, but he’s stricken with an astounding level of cognitive dissonance. He seems incapable of having that inner monologue that permits him to question what he’s being fed. It’s quite depressing to witness and then extrapolate what that means for society at large.
KGB: ” I’ve known this guy for much of my life, he was Salutatorian of his H.S. class when that still meant something. He’s no dummy, but he’s stricken with an astounding level of cognitive dissonance. He seems incapable of having that inner monologue that permits him to question what he’s being fed. It’s quite depressing to witness and then extrapolate what that means for society at large.”
That’s the moast important observation [frankly the only salient observation] to have made over the last four or five years of observing the Hellscape of Klownworld: This whatever it is – I want to call it “Social Proof”, but others in the old Game community use a definition of “Social Proof” with which I disagree – this whatever it is has a mesmerizingly hypnotic influence over Normies cum NPCs.
As though the Normie-cum-NPC Amygdala is frozen in time – somehow gagged & imprisoned & shackled – leaving it no longer able to interact with the conscious mind.
It could be that the deep Inner Hajnalian personality was always this mersmerizable & hypnotizable, and we just didn’t realize it because none of us Inner Hajnalians had the chutzpah necessary to manipulate and capitalize on this mersmerizability & hypnotizability of ours, but it’s also possible that some new vector of Evil has been introduced into the equation, a vector which is somehow suppressing the Amygdala, and, if so, Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors [SSRIs] might be that vector.
The only question I have is, Why in the world were you watching football to begin with? I mean, are you next going to start bringing up the NBA? Who cares?
Z-Man, are you familiar with Rolo Slavskiy’s blog? It’s worth a read. He is Russian, pro-Russia and provides interesting takes on the war situation and Russian politics. His estimate of Ukrainian losses is much lower.
Do you really think that Ukraine would be conscripting 15 year old boys and 60 year old geezers if their loses were not horrendous?
Are they really conscripting 15 year olds? Or is that just a mirror side of unreality?
With so many streams of propaganda coming from all directions, it’s difficult to know what is the truth.
Well, the Ukrainians seem to be conscripting those inconvenient Transcarpathian Hungarians, and shipping them off to some of the hottest parts of the front to get wasted.
Getting in a little ethnic cleansing while the getting is good.
https://gatesofvienna.net/2023/01/ethnic-cleansing-of-hungarians-in-ukraine/
That is more plausible and very different from conscripting 15 year olds, so it doesn’t really answer my question.
Also, Hungary is still very butthurt about Trianon and would like to annex that part of Ukraine. So, naturally, they are looking for a pretext.
There were pictures and posts about a guy with no hands who was conscripted and went through several exams who had no hands. So yeah, they’re taking horrendous casualties. But those crafty Ukrainians can always work in a little ethnic cleansing.
They are conscripting ridiculously hot 20 something supermodel females, so why not 15 year old boys.
>They are conscripting ridiculously hot 20 something supermodel females
Haha
> Do you really think that Ukraine would be conscripting 15 year old boys and 60 year old geezers if their loses were not horrendous?
Yes. Ukraine is a huge country and the current line of contact with Russia is long. Plus they have to staff local garrisons and keep reserves handy for the expected Russian offensives that could come from 3 directions.
I am not familiar with his site, but keep in mind that Russians are extremely pessimistic people by nature. In the case of this war, anything short of a mushroom cloud over Kiev is viewed as a lack of will by the Kremlin. Everyone of them was sure the Kherson offensive was a disaster for Russia, when it was a great tactic victory.
True, the depressed Russian is a stereotype for a reason.
That being said, when you look at the war map, the front line has barely moved over the months. Perhaps a prolonged trench war is exactly what certain elites desire?
From the Russian perspective, this is not about moving lines on a map. It is about destroying the Ukrainian army. Destroy the army and the map resolves itself. That is why they did what they did in Kherson. They traded land for large numbers of destroyed Ukrainian machines and dead Ukrainian soldiers. You see the same thing happening in Bakhmut. The Russians have created a funnel into which Ukrainian reserves flow to be hit with Russian artillery.
Once it was clear that Washington would not allow Europe or Ukraine to make a peace deal, they transitioned into a long term strategy for the larger way, of which Ukraine is a part. The only way Russia gets what they want is when Ukraine is exhausted militarily and economically. That takes time and the careful uses of resources. if that mean the lines on the map remain statics they degrade the Ukrainian army, so be it.
According to Col MacGregor, there is more to it than that. He notes it took him a long time to understand the nature of modern industrial warfare has changed. Instead of blitzkrieg its ISR umbrellas. Satellites, air surveillance, drones, passive sensors (acoustic/seismic) and the like allow detection of the enemy at the platoon or lower level (astonishing) and coordinated rocket, artillery, bombing, and mortar fire in seconds to destroy them. Thus armies move much much slower to stay under their protective umbrella. Making this an industrial production war as much as anything else. And that the Russians no longer can afford to waste men for demographic reasons.
Back in 2014-2015 I did a post about this. The modern military operates in four dimensions, the normal three dimensions plus time.
As far as demographics, the Russians are in better shape than the West. They are younger and they have leadership that grasps the demographic challenges of this age. Russia has pro-natal polices, rather than open borders. I forget where I saw it, but Russia has more students in STYEM that the US, despite having a smaller population. This suggest they are investing in their own human capital.
Putin said on day one what his goals were. The demilitarization of Ukraine was #1.
The Ukrainian’s for no good reason that I can see other than the need to feed the media, are continuously replacing the several Brigades they’ve had under fire in Bakhmut for several months. They are outgunned by a factor of eight or more, their losses are in a similar proportion.They persist in feeding the meat-grinder. From the Russian perspective this sure beats having to chase them all over Ukraine.
That’s true- a Polish girl told me about East European greetings:
Where we say, “how ya doing'” and the reply is “good, good, doing fine,” the Eastern reply is, “not good, not good,” everything is always terrible.
Eastern Europeans take “how ya doing’” as a serious question and tell you how they really feel.
Yes, some of Rolo’s stuff about Russia’s internal politics and society was fascinating, but I’m so on Team Putin and Russia that the pessimism started to wear on me
It’s a good counter to the optimism and 5D theorizing among the other pro-Russia bloggers (including Z).
It never hurts to consider other points of view.
I suspect the ranks are largely and sufficiently being filled by the recent poc economic migrants that were given citizenship …but I could be completely wrong about that
You also need to remember that the media had a big switch in the mid-1970s through the 1990s. Before that time, most reporters either didn’t go to college or went to some local college. They also didn’t get paid that much. They working to middle-class guys who had grown up working or middle-class.
Also, TV was staffed by former print reporters.
That started to change in the mid to late 70s. By the 1990s, all new reporters had been to college, and top media outlets generally only hired people from top schools. Reporters were now from upper-middle to wealthy backgrounds and had grown up in and been educated by the hive mind.
These reporters had never dealt with reality at any point in their lives, so believing the narrative wasn’t difficult. They didn’t know any different. Maybe a few old hands were still around to inject a bit of reality, but they had all retired by ~2010, leaving the organizations completely in control of the crazies.
About a year in to my last gig in TV news (director, technical director), I witnessed the last of the old-school reporters either retiring, leaving for PR positions, or being forced out. The most notable was a state politics reporter; at his retirement party, the Governor showed up, because they had a real relationship. Believe me, this reporter knew the ins and outs of state politics and was not easily BS’ed.
Another was the lead weatherman. This guy was a local who really knew the subtleties of the area weather. He was also a long-time volunteer ski patroller who did really good ski segments, seasonal gardening bits, etc. Very highly regarded in the community, but was replaced with a fresh, young college grad who knew absolutely nothing and could only read from the info the weather service gave him.
These two were typical. Sure, they had their own biases, but they were professional enough to hide them quite well. The kids they were replaced with were morons with absolutely no curiosity about the world. They only wanted to be on TV.
From my time in the technical end of broadcasting automation also played a role. With automation and the demand to fill time as network compensation disappeared and syndicated programming became ever more expensive the time was filled with more news.
With more news came less time to report in depth and more dependence on national sources to fill time. Sources from Reuters to CNN filled more local time while at the same time local reporters had less time to do in depth reporting.
Now couple that with less well rounded or outright woke journalists coming out of colleges and Houston we have a problem.
Regarding the US sending tanks to Ukraine, there appears to be a lot of smoke and mirror tactics being quietly pulled by the regime. While known inventory numbers over 4,000 tanks, the planned 31 set aside are not being culled from existing stock. Instead, they will be built by the manufacturer. While the idea of sending tanks is folly, the decision to build new ones instead of using existing ones is a blatant example of how corrupt this entire charade truly is. Just one example after another of making sure everyone gets their beaks wet.
‘U.S. to give Ukraine advanced M1 tanks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/24/abrams-leopard-tanks-ukraine/
“The U.S. vehicles, probably numbering at least 30, are unlikely to arrive by spring, when Russian forces are expected to begin a new offensive and Ukraine plans to launch its own counteroffensive to take back Russian-occupied territory. Instead, the Abramses are “probably not for the near fight,” one U.S. official said, and are not likely to arrive for many months, if not years.
“…Pentagon officials have emphasized in recent weeks that they are planning how to build Kyiv’s security forces for the future. The Abramses are expected to be ordered from manufacturers, rather than transferred from existing U.S. stocks, and the main usefulness in announcing them now appeared designed to break a logjam with the Germans.”
It mostly is a grift, but the empty gesture is meant as kabuki to shame Europeans into doing more, too.
True, but the estimated costs (which will go over budget, of course) for this tank contract is around 500-600 million.
I was alluding to the media not broadcasting the quiet part that these tanks aren’t getting loaded onto the railroad next week for shipment.
Can’t we just lease the tanks to them? After the war we hire a firm to go over damages and ding them for a few more bucks from which the US gave them.
Haha! Just beat them up a bit and leave them in place in Lima, so all the Patriot Kids From Alabama signing up can pose for their picture before shipping off to basic.
*of course, basic doesn’t exist and the Patriot Kids are hired actors
but you knew that already
I can see it now:
“Ok Captain Ivanovich, you had the basic 36 month lease with 10K miles / year and we counted 36,510 on the odometer. At $.30/mile that works out to $1,953.00 you owe us. And we did a walk around inspection and found you’re missing two armored skirts on the right side of the tank and a third on the left is dented so badly it needs replacing. So that’s 3 armored skirt sections at $25K apiece for $75K total.
Now the track pads have little to no tread left so a total track replacement will run you $50K a side, so you’re at $100K there. Also, you failed to clean the vehicle inside or out so that’s an extra, let me see here, ah, $2,500 for maintenance and cleaning.
So all told Captain Ivanovich you owe us $179,453. Before tax of course.”
“F🤬ck You, Americanski!”
Well, this should generate a few jobs at the Lima, OH tank plant, if they can find skilled labor.
Meanwhile, Raytheon has something like 2500 engineering jobs on their website, about 1000 of which require no clearance at all. Many of the jobs have signing bonuses from $10k to $40k.
I wonder why they aren’t snapping up all the highly-qualified engineers swimming across the Rio Grande?
You are spot on here:
“Given that this is a human system, it means the system has been selecting for people who favor unreality over reality. Over time, it ceases to be a competition around specific reality but reality itself.”
Otherwise, I have a different take. Yes, the media always has been biased, in fact, it also always has been propaganda. There was more or less a monopoly on the information that actually reached the masses, with outliers having a very limited influence. Sure, there were opposition outlets here and there but they were few and reached few.
Then came digital media and it became possible for outliers to reach the masses and influence events in a way never before possible. For example, there were a myriad of reasons for the unhinged responses to Trump but the main one was media narratives were immediately countered and overcome by individuals with access to the internet. A society built on propaganda and controlled information cannot thrive with impunity in such an environment.
Censorship was a very noticeable reaction. It, too, always has existed but in a less ham-handed way. Threatened by alternative media, the propaganda organs decided to remove from their platforms any counter to the narrative. Hence there is Truth and it is the only information presented on traditional platforms. Any counter is deplatformed to the fullest extent possible. Further, and this is significant, deliberately false information is now employed in a widespread way never experienced before. Fraudulent stories also were pushed in the past but never before in such a breathtaking manner. Lies, deceit and fraud not only are common but no longer hidden or retracted at any point.
Finally, we cannot overlook the 666-pound gorilla in the room, Tribal control of the traditional “media.” Most people in the Tribe have only one goal–to push the interests of the Tribe and to destroy its enemies. This is a group with generally high intelligence and poor impulse control that will do anything and everything to control the flow of information. It has controlled every aspect of the Regime for a long time and is horrified that it may lose its grip. Free speech is not a Tribal value. Information is control for them.
This ultimately will not work for the censorship regime. Information gets out and will get out, just as it has in every previous totalitarian society. The only question is whether that will matter. As society fragments and separates, I suspect it will matter around the margins.
Today’s Z-post will be proclaimed as “a threat to our democracy” and will be read in a concerned tone from teleprompters by news anchormen and anchorwomen throughout the land!
I will also accept
*Zarticle
*Zessay
*Zcreed
Well if the good Conservatives at The American Mind won’t acknowledge Z-Man, then YOUR EVENING NEWS won’t either.
If one likes chicken, Zaxby’s has pretty good Zalads. 🙂
1002 stations will recite last sighting the man of mystery in a hoodie and mask in Donesk Oblast!
The internet has collapsed the traditional media business model. So yes, the narrative machine is irritating, but it is the logical consequence of advertising-driven media in the internet age. The mere existence of Substack and media exiles on blogs (Taibbi, Greenwald) shows there is a craving for reality-based reportage. But it is “narrowcasting”, not broadcasting.
The censorship suits corporate advertisers just fine, because they care about context. They don’t want their yoga pants placed next to Donald Trump’s tweets, for example. They want predictability and there’s nothing more predictable than CNN.
I don’t really consider the author of “1 Billion Americans” a “reality based reporter” but he does manage to annoy the groupthink establishment once in awhile. I wonder if he does it for amusement rather than actually believing what he is writing.
Excellent points, and I am trying to build upon them, slightly. Most of us here are probably older, Boomers and such. I don’t have precise dates, but it’s worth remembering that before about the 1970s, there were only three major TV nationwide networks. I’m not sure about radio. Until about the 1980s the FCC limited ownership of radio and TV stations, effectively inhibiting monopoly and promoting at least some local/regional programming. Especially with TV, it was strictly an advertising (business) supported media, with rare exceptions like that odd new duck called PBS. There were strict limits on what could be advertised on the airwaves, too. All that, of course, is long gone.
A major point relevant to what Capt. said: that means that advertising at the national level had to be tailored to an extremely broad market. Restricted regional markets, in contrast, allowed more targeting, but it was still extremely coarse, compared to what came later.
Now let’s consider the internet. While it existed in embryonic form into (technically) the 1960s, for all practical purposes we were still using dial-up modems well into the 1990s. The internet in commercial form, for a mass market, effectively didn’t exist until the early 21st century. Some of our biggest “tech” companies didn’t exist, or were itty bitty, as recently as the Clinton administration.
The loosening of laws, the consolidation of ownership into quasi-monopolies, have imposed massive changes in media consumption. On the plus side, a certain amount of democratization occurred, allowing sites like this to exist. Also advertising becomes much more targeted.
Pardon my rambling, perhaps. But looking back, it’s amazing how drastically our media, as well as much else, has changed in half a century, or even much shorter time periods.
I wonder if they plan on sending Brits, Germans and Americans into the war zone for all the maintenance these tanks require. Because any Ukrainians they want to send to a neutral country to be trained on these tanks, can’t be in two places at once and so their maintenance crews would be unable to maintain existing tanks while on training.
Mercenaries haven’t had it this good since the glory days of African wars in the 70s/80s. Fort Benning will be stripped of all the 35K tank repairmen. They will reappear in Kiev as 200K mercs. Capitalism in action brothers!
Assuming the Russians don’t just kill them all. What good is a paycheck anyways if you’re not alive to cash it?
True, although it would be better to send the maintenance crews to whomever the Ukrainians sell these tanks to.
Speaking to the normie leftists in my life, they have gotten my spiel about the mainstream media being a propaganda arm of the Regime, which includes Fox News (and that really gets them confused!). They really think that, for all its faults, the MSM has “fact checkers” and seasoned “journalists” who are out for big-T Truth. So anyone who works for the Washington Post, for example, is always better than the noticer dude working in the proverbial basement. Actually lefty has a name for the noticer dude: “crazy conspiracist”.
On a good day, the most you can move the needle with the MSM-addicted is to get them to acknowledge the media is “corporate”. Money runs everything, you see? So yes there is probably “some” propaganda. But the stuff YOU read Marko is by some random unknown guy, what could HE possibly know??
We need to convince people to treat journos like the Romans treated actors: with contempt.
Even if they weren’t propagandists, most journos are contemptible scum. They were always thought of in that way before Hollywood start writing all the hero lovable journos in their propaganda films. It’s the same thing with actors. These fields just attract all the worst people. Imagine wanting to be a movie star and moving to Hollywood or believing your dummy opinion needs to be propagated to all the little people!
I call it “Rockstar Syndrome”, and it seems to affect scientists every bit as much as journos and actors.
It’s characteristics are gaining recognition for achieving some degree of success in a specialized field, and then deciding this makes you a Renaissance Man, whose pontifications on all matters great and small are of earth-shattering consequence.
Trouble is, it doesn’t seem to be confined to rockstars anymore.
Don’t volunteer for the role as Sisiphus; lugging all of those empty-eyed leftists up the hill, placing them back ont their feet at the crest, only to watch them dive headfirst toward the bottom of the hill where this all started. If they are people with whom you have family ties, or who are long-standing friends, this is certainly understandable, and no rancor on my part is to be imputed to my words. But it is, sadly, a bootless task.
That’s the first such reference I’ve read for the Romans. I’m not surprised, though. Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, I, 7) says much the same of the Greeks, which is probably where the Romans got their disgust of actors. Epicurus called Plato and the Platonists “Flatterers of Dionysus,” an epithet for an actor or a sycophant to a tyrant.
I remember the first rollout of overt entertainment-ization and propaganda-ization of war. After Vietnam the establishment was upset that the media parted with the state and gave unfavorable coverage of the war. The state did two things in response. They eliminated the draft and created a permanent, standing, volunteer military. They came up with a plan to turn the media coverage into entertainment and a psy-op.
The first rollout was the televised removal of Manuel Noriega from Panama. Americans popped popcorn and watched us go get the bad guy like it was a cop show. Next up was Gulf War I – Operation Desert Storm. Military generals gave play-by-play, they cut to footage of B1 Bomber pilots, presented select military men’s personal human stories, and provided round the clock War Room reporting. It looked exactly like NFL Sportsball big game productions. Rather, I think the NFL adopted the format for its broadcasts that mesmerize Boobus just as the ODS broadcasts did. They even ran promotions for our wonderful military technology. General Schwarzkopf was made into a celebrity general and Colin Powell was lauded as a genius and poster child for a post-racial military and America.
It is true that there was some controlled opposition still on CNN in those days, but not on war coverage. They put an end to that after Vietnam. American warfare took into account the American public and the need to turn Boobus into a pom-pom twirler and Off-ense!! chanter as much or more as it did the actual war fighting. Given that we were bombing goat herders and city peasants in deserts and mountain ranges with almost no air-defenses, that worked.
What we are seeing now is the degeneracy of a credo that emerged from that post Vietnam consensus – that the managerial class could, “Manage Perceptions.” The same is true of economic matters. The same is true of political matters. I think the un-reality watershed moment was Paul Krugman’s Keynsianism meets Goebbels essay proposing that we could spend our way out of debt by pretending we are going to fight a war against space aliens. His argument was that we should engage in Pump Priming when the well is dry meets Battlestar Gallactica make works projects. That was stupid and silly enough. The real breakthrough there was the chutzpah to outright say that we should organize and mobilize all of the resources of society around a gigantic lie – that we are going to be invaded by space aliens.
I can’t remember what year of the Obama administration that Krugman op-ed came out. Like the ODS official psy-op-ification and entertainment-ization of military endeavors, it will turn out to be a major marker in managerialism announcing its own stupidity and failure, and the imminent fall of America.
Don’t forget the gulf war trading cards.
And the red, white and blue “Star Spangled Banner” rendition by Whitney Houston before Superbowl 25, just as Desert Storm was kicking off. It all came together in one neat package.
There’s a school of thought out there that suggests the only thing that lifted the world out of a Global Depression in the 1930’s was WWII.
(Never mentioned: 75 million dead and unimaginable destruction)
With debt at unstainable levels, I can’t help but think there’s a crowd out there that wants WWIII just to “reset” everything.
The thing about war is, it’s incredibly unpredictable. Strong powers lose, empires fade forever.
how many people still get their information from the msm? seems like quite a few. a large percentage of the remainder don’t have any interest in news (e.g. blacks and mexicans). this whole enterprise of lies depends on people being like goldfish, and lacking any capacity to remember what they have previously been told. if they did, the lies would be very obvious. if you try and point out the truth to the believers, you come across as insane. so all one can do is ignore the lies and ignore the lie eaters, and wait for nature to start a cleaning cycle. until normies start paying a terrible price for their acquiescence, there is no reason for all this to stop.
Boomers get their information entirely from the msm. As they remain the most important voting bloc (for the time being) and the wealthiest generation (ad revenue), this remains important.
Once the Boomers go, the msm is dead.
I’m going to suggest a “functionalist” explanation for why they deliberately choose unreality: It gives them more arenas in which to fight out their virtue contests; more holiness spirals on which to get the inside track.
I forget who said “the reason faculty lounge fights are so nasty is because the issues are so small,” but he was wrong — funny, but wrong. The issues aren’t even small; they’re completely immaterial. They don’t intersect with the real world in any way, for the simple reason that they can’t. The Intersectional Marxist Feminists have deep and long-standing grief with the Feminist Intersectional Marxists, but no one outside the club could ever even tell what they are. And that’s important, but by far more important is the fact that it’s impossible for anyone to win. The point of the fight is to fight, because that’s the only thing that gives their sad little lives meaning.
So, re: Ukraine, what choices are on the table for sane people? Reporting on the reality can only lead you to a few conclusions, and what good will they do you, socially? “It’s a losing hand and we’d better fold before we go completely broke” isn’t a hot take on Twitter. There’s no virtue juice to be squeezed from it. You’ll be proven right, of course, but what good is that? if you’ve got any friends left by the time you’re proven right, they’ll all hate you for it.
Making an empirically-verifiable statement — especially one that turns out to be true — is dirty pool, because the point of the fight is to keep having the fight. It’s all just Blue Checkmark drama-rama that only makes sense to people who live on Twitter.
(Side note: I strongly encourage everyone to at least look at Twitter. Especially the accounts of “journalists.” And not just brand name ones. Follow the reporters for your local rags. You’ll be shocked — these people literally LIVE on Twitter. I spent a while paging through the timeline of one of the jokers at my local newspaper; I literally couldn’t figure out when he slept. He had Tweets from every single hour of the day. Do that, and all this will make a lot more sense).
New series!
“Blue Checkmark Wives of Georgetown”
Related to your point, one of the more spicy commenters on Gab noted that anyone who argued politics honestly with their friends soon wouldn’t have any friends.
As to your second point a lot of us don’t get “e-drama”, the fakest and gayest of perhaps any drama. Although predominant among young women even some old guy like that Anton fellow who is stalking Z with his stupidity can’t get enough. I can imagine him printing out his retarded supportive comments and wallpapering his bathroom with them.
“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.” – H.L. Mencken
“If you don’t read the papers, your uninformed. If you read the papers, you’re mis-informed.”
“The main newspapers during the Cold War made sure to include critics of American Cold War policy along with conservative critics of progressive social policy. The television chat shows made sure to have at least one conservative on the panel. There was always a bias and a lack of balance, but alternative voices did have a place.”
Not that it matters but even in the old days the latitude for debate was sharply circumscribed. Thus, to give a silly and extreme example, you couldn’t have someone extolling the Soviet system. But yes, that limited latitude for criticism and alternative views has shrunk to close to zero and mass media brays and bleats with one voice.
As for the system of unreality, we just live in the Matrix. As you state in your last paragraph, to find out what is *not* happening you follow the mass media. It’s like the old Soviet joke about Pravda: if there was some article praising the Soviet aerospace industry, you knew there had been a Soviet air accident.
I haven’t watched mainstream network news in years. Occasionally local to get the latest weather forecast, or maybe there’s a cute anchorette on one of the stations. Sometimes, I won’t shut it down soon enough and get the dramatic musical intro of the national network leading into the latest BIG news story, uh, I mean lie…
The local news is absolutely as fake and gay as the network news. And, as Z-Man has pointed out many times, it’s obvious that the younger generation of anchors and reporterettes are blindingly unintelligent. Couple that to the trend of claiming that they’re “on your side” and it makes for gratingly awful content.
Agreed. There is no daylight between local and national broadcasts now. In the past there was some.
There are some clips out there that show national, regional and local news shows all repeating the exact same headlines. They support your point. They are all faxed the exact same talking point for the day and repeat it verbatim.
They are selected for looks and a desire to be … “someone important … like an actor”, when they are plugged into The Matrix.
I really can’t stand all the overt emoting. I mean, every single story must be read with an obvious emotional tone.
Cue the somber piano bumper music, with touching still shots, and a #YourTownStrong campaign.
I watched Good Morning America once.
The secret is, watch it with the sound off.
The visual subliminals are the real message:
The hopeful but striving Latina, leading to-
The strong leadership of the Black Lady community organizer, leading to-
The broken-down, fat, dysfunctional White single mom, struggling to find inspiring examples like the Latina abd Black Lady.
Women watch the news to make sure they get the steps right in the signaling hierarchy.
Now that’s the kind of cynicism I can support.
Once I was in the waiting area at some medical practice, and they had The View on the television. Fortunately, they had a side alcove in which one could shelter from the hideous spectacle where there was no television, and I availed myself of this port in the storm. That stock cast you mentioned was much in evidence, and the abject c*ntery on display was too much to handle.
I record Tucker, which usually doesn’t end until Hannity is about 30 seconds into his act. Every opening is breaking news, which is just the same crap you heard all day, but with Lindsay Graham or some other RINO yapping about the old news. It’s really amazing how effective “breaking news” followed by nothing is on civnats.