The overused cliché about the truth being the first casualty of war is an overused cliché because it is so obviously true. Wars are the result of rulers on both sides seeing advantage in the suffering of their people. That means producing a story to explain to the people why they must sacrifice for the ruler. The war in the Ukraine is no exception, but it may be the first war to be turbocharged by the narrative industrial complex through the internet.
For several months, the usual suspects have been promoting a narrative framework with regards to a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Tens of billions of Western arms have been shipped to Ukraine, along with plane loads of cash. This has been done to great political fanfare in every Western capital. Slowly, the story evolved into the great spring offensive in which a newly formed Ukrainian army using Western super-weapons would smash through the Russian lines and send them fleeing.
The explanation for how this would work or why it should be attempted was never provided, but a good story is worth skipping over the details. Russia has about half a million men in Ukraine at the moment. They have air superiority, and they have a growing advantage in firepower. How a seventy-thousand-man attack force could smash through their lines was left to the imagination. That is where people like Edward Luttwak filled the void with serious sounding plans for the attack.
In the age of narrative, facts about firepower and troop strength are no match for a really good story. The story was so good, in fact, that last week the internet was full of rumors that the Ukrainians had launched a counterattack in Bakhmut, sending the Russians fleeing. The prophesies were true! It turned out that it was nothing more than a faint to try and evacuate Azov fighters trapped by Wagner forces, who continue to grind down the remaining forces in the city.
Eventually reality does prevail, and we may be entering a phase of the war in which reality slowly overcomes the current narratives. We are a month from summer and there is no sign of a counter-offensive. Zelensky has been on a tour of European capitals, demanding more weapons and money. He says they lack the weapons to conduct an offensive and his advisors are echoing his claims. Even Washington is starting to back off the spring counter-offensive narrative.
The reason for this is those facts on the ground. For close to a year the Russians have been launching drone and missile attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid. It was assumed that they were trying to turn off the lights, but in reality, they were exhausting the Ukrainian air defense system. They determined that Ukraine had a finite number of surface-to-air-missiles. The West had no replacements, so once that stock was exhausted, the air defense system would collapse.
This is where things are now. The Russians are now using their air force to attack high value targets in Ukraine. The Russian hit a large warehouse facility where Ukraine was stockpiling weapons. The resulting mushroom cloud revealed that it was a massive facility, perhaps holding depleted uranium shells supplied by Britain. The increase in gamma radiation seems to confirm it. Some reports claim half a billion dollars in weapons were destroyed in that one strike.
A few days ago, there was another missile strike on Kiev aimed at a high value target, this time a Patriot missile system. The West has supplied two of these to defend Zelensky from a decapitation strike. A Russian missile struck in or around the system, after it expended all of its missiles to defend itself. Even CNN had to concede that the video of the strike was real. Reliable reports say one launcher was destroyed, one launcher was severely damaged, and one launcher survived.
What we are seeing over the last month is both an increase in the use of the Russian air force over Ukraine and their greater success. The Russian are now hitting high value targets with increasing regularity. One theory for why there has been no Ukrainian offensive is the Russians keep blowing up their equipment. Some of the shiny new Western equipment has been turning up in Bakhmut, suggesting Ukraine has had no choice but to repurpose this material.
There is something else lurking over all of this. The West is out of ammo. All of the old Soviet era stockpiles have been depleted. The stockpiles of Western weapons have been run down as well. The thirty Patriot missiles Ukraine fired off the other night cost five million a copy. The waiting list for new ones is over a year. Just as Russia is getting better at destroying Ukrainian weapons, the supply is running low. It is not hard to see what will happen in the not-so-distant future.
Since the war started, there was a gap between what the narrative industrial complex was emitting and what was happening in reality. That gap was concealed by media perfidy and the glacial pace of the war of attrition. Those slow changes in the battlefield were easily obscured by the tsunami of storytelling in the media. We are now entering a phase where that gap cannot be concealed. We can see what is happening on the ground does not match the current narratives.
The expression “narrative collapse” is most often used with regards to a political scandal or a scandal with famous people. The story offered to explain things is slowly undermined by reality. At some point, even the creators of the narrative have to admit it is not reality. The release of the Durham report is a case in point. The Trump haters like Jonah Goldberg have had to finally admit they were lying. Their Russia collusion narrative had finally collapsed.
We are about to see something similar with the Ukraine war. We are now entering the narrative collapse phase. The sharps are already heading for the exits, while stupid people like David French wait for the signal. It will not happen overnight, but the process has begun and by the end of the year, the brooms will be out in the media, assigned to sweeping the whole thing under the rug. Like prior failed narratives, this one will be deposited in the memory hole.
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Narrative collapse hits the pro-Russian dissident right hard too. Russia was often represented as a self-sufficient, morally sound, socially healthy nation with a legitimate gripe against the globohomo West.
Screwing up their invasion ripped the bandaid off. People looked deeper; revealing a corrupt, incompetent, low-trust, institutionally homosexual drugs-and-STDs-infested multi-ethnic empire ruled by Chosen espionage bureaucrats dependent on foreign industry.
The credibility earned by accurate predictions with race realism or domestic political critiques suddenly has to be balanced against blithe confidence in the grossly wrong. When attacked by leftists in the future, many dissidents will no longer be able to say we’re reliably right about basic facts. Some won’t even be able to say they quickly updated their beliefs to match the truth.
Narrative collapse doesn’t help if it’s a fake narrative in the first place. Neocon involvement is crucial to understand this. The “War on Terror “ was a failure, but the real war to make the neighborhood safer for Israel was arguably a success. Likewise, defending the plucky Ukrainians from Russian aggression will probably end with most of them dead (at least the men), but setting up a Khazar bazaar athwart China’s Belt and Road is a smart play.
It’s implicit in a narrative collapsing that it is fake or false, so what exactly is your point supposed to be?
That even the lies are lies.
The Narrative Industrial Complex fails to understand Russian strategy. This is because American military leaders are illiterate as to military history. Ike’s Broad Front strategy – reviled by some historians since – was to collapse slowly and comprehensively on Berlin, his order from Marshall, to “Destroy the German Army in the field” so it would not rise again in 20 years as it had 1918-1938. American military leadership, instead, gives us the “Thunder Run” into Baghdad – leaving trained, armed men all over Iraq to continue killing Americans for years. Speed is not always the best option; killing the enemy – is. Russia is just applying a Broad Front strategy to Ukraine and destroying their army in the field. When this is all over, Ukraine will be as much of a threat to Russia as is the German army today – training with broomsticks cuz they’d rather spend on coffee than kids and weapons.
The fact that Market Garden happened suggests Ike got talked out of this broad front strategy, at least for a moment.
5 million for a single Patriot missile
At least 90% of the readers of this blog have little hope of making that much money in our lifetimes of work. That means that one explosive weapon is literally of more value to our rulers than a lifetime of individual labor and productivity.
When you frame it that way in your mind, and just consider that for a moment, the idea that this country is somehow better or more moral than Russia evaporates instantly.
The Patriot system destroyed cost $1.2 billion and 30 missiles cost $150 million–all destroyed in 2 minutes..How many homeless veterans could have been given lodging and care for that kind of money?
Am I mistaken for believing your typical homeless “veteran” is usually some guy who got kicked out of boot camp in the second week?
I doubt that.
I mean, is it possible that some of the idiots standing at the overpass with a cardboard sign that says “homeless veteran” are what you describe. Sure. But as far as official statistics go, someone kicked out of basic training or boot camp doesn’t qualify to be called a “veteran”
https://usveteransmagazine.com/2019/11/qualifies-someone-veteran/
Also source: myself, a homeowner veteran who endured 2 months of basic training, 6 months of AIT, and a 4 year enlistment.
I admire your misplaced patriotism, but question your common sense. I’ll bet if you had known what you know today, you would have stayed out. Amiright?
I’m inclined to think you are mistaken.
When the Ggrrlpower navy pilot plowed the f35 into the deck, thatvwas about $90,000,000 in 8 seconds, 11.25 million per second. 30 Patriot missles in 90 seconds is 1.7 million per second.
Conclusion: white women can still outspend Jews ten-to-one.
Apparently, this is not any kind of priority in some quarters, as homeless vets in NYC are being disposessed of their apartments to provide living spaces for illegal migrants.
But the same situation applies for retired people in Switzerland and/or Germany, who are being given the boot for those countries’ illegal migrants.
How many homeless veterans would come to the (at least rhetorical) defense of Daniel Penny?
Post-WWII, the heritage American citizen should have sustained a living standard at least equal to Swiss citizens. High quality lifestyle and infrastructure. The stars were aligned. However, the MIC, security apparatus and global bankers had other plans for us, namely, enriching and empowering themselves without limit while pulling up the ladder behind them. And we sheeple undertook no response of consequence when there was opportunity to right the ship. Timothy McVeigh was the clarion call but given the current state of Ameri-mutts, there will be no resistance and we will become slaves unless the cloud people destroy themselves. I find it hard to believe.
“Timothy McVeigh was the clarion call”
Just like Timothy McVeigh you’re a fed or such a counterproductive retard that you might as well be
One argument I’ve never understood is the feminist argument about equal pay. I don’t believe in the 77 cents thing but if it was real,wouldn’t that mean hiring women would be a smart idea because you’d only have to pay them 77 percent of what you would a man
That’s assuming you would get at least 77 percent of the output of a man.
And to be fair, that’s not fair to good women. Lord knows my wife works harder than me, cumulatively. I have my hobbies outside of work, whereas she spends her out of work hours keeping the house going.
But, to be fair to me, I’m not a bum, and I absolutely take care of the kids and cook a lot.
I believe prior studies have shown the 77% stat to be a myth once pay is controlled for jobs taken. In other words, men do harder manual labor and more dangerous jobs which most women eschew. Other factors, such as seniority and total work hours per week also contribute somewhat, but occupation choice is the biggie.
This is why we have had proposals in the past (as far back as the Reagan administration) for setting comparable pay levels for different occupations in which we find sex differences. In other words, if a committee decides that a receptionist’s job is as societally important as a garbage collector, the pay scales will be mandated the same. Free market be damned. I believe they had the audacity to call it equal pay for equal work, even though the comparison crossed job classifications.
Equal pay for equal work, as in same occupation and title, is pretty much the law of the land. Woe be it to the employer if he attempts to low ball a job offer to a women when he has men starting at greater wages for the same job title.
At the university I once had an HR inquiry wrt to my pay rate as compared to a female in another department. IIRC, she got a raise that year. 😉 BTW, such discrepancies used to be common between male and females. My wife was called in by her boss (large, very large multinational firm) for yearly evaluation and told that her salary increment (yearly raise) would be *less* than the males in the group because “they had families to support”. That shit was real and was not even considered unfair.
It’s not worth it, the menses attract bears.
Hi. My name is Poindexter, and my IQ is one-hund…..aaaaaaaargh!!!
Yes. Those greedy capitalists who care only about maximizing profits would fire all the men they could and replace them with women who make 23% less. The firm who did that first would crush the competition either on price or price and reinvestment or both.
So the myth of the gender pay gap is not on praxeological disproven, but it also uses their caricature/cartoon version of a capitalist against itself.
But, we are far past owning and laughing at these clowns. They are laughing at us as they shut us out of the system using their myths and lies.
The pay difference has been debunked many times…Adjusting for experience, credentials, and hours actually worked, women make more per hour than men…
The problem I have with the whole “narrative collapse” argument is that it implies that when the narrative collapses, the public will become redpilled and say “A-ha! The bastards were lying! We’ll never believe them again!”
But they never do. Every narrative has collapsed — that we needed to kill Huns in 1917 to “make the world safe for democracy,” that “Hitler woulda had us all speakin’ German,” the Gulf of Tonkin and the “domino theory,” “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, the “war on Terror” in Afghanistan to “keep us safe,” to supporting the Kurds in Syria against our Turk allies while trying to overthrow the government of Assad which was backed by the Russians — because “ISIL.”
Every time a narrative collapses, it has no effect. The organs of propaganda gin up another narrative, and the gullible rubes swallow it hook, line, and sinker like the suckers that they are.
We went from a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan after TWENTY YEARS, leaving billions in equipment behind, Afghans falling off departing aircraft, 13 Marines killed for nothing, right into “we need to give hundreds of billions to the Jewish comedian in corrupt Ukraine where the president’s crackhead son was taking bribes… to fight for freedom and democracy.”
And the rubes lapped it right up.
Narratives get forgotten as quickly as ephemeral trivia like who won the World Series or three years ago or who won a Grammy the year before last. There are always new narratives getting shoveled into the bullshit machine and they always seem to be successful in hypnotizing the hoi polloi.
The funny thing is how the narrative-makers don’t even seem to care that you know they’re making it up. Remember how they announced in the last year of the Obama administration simply announced they were going to “pivot” from the Middle East to confronting China? Remember how Biden gloated on videotape how he withheld U.S. aid to get the Ukrainians to stop investigating his crack head kid who was taking bribes from Burisma? They know the rubes will lap up the bullshit… and they’re right.
tbf, the typical AINO griller and shitlib still believe, to this day, that Hitler would have had us all speaking German
There are worse things.
Ich möchte Deutsch sprechen.
There’s a reason The Man in the High Castle got the gay, feminist and POC treatment by Amazon Prime in latter seasons. Nazi-occupied America looked too damned desirable to ordinary folks.
The one narrative collapse that has not been forgotten, at least in comparison to the others, has been Covid. That some of the viral fraud still is on rare occasion mentioned and remarked upon from time to time seems to cause a great deal of discomfit. I’ll grant it isn’t much but it is there. Contrast that with the total memoryholing of Afghanistan, for example, and the withdrawal debacle at the tail end of Covid. It might as well have been a dream.
You are otherwise 100 percent accurate. Along with propaganda, the Regime pumps out volumes of unrelated useless information and it overloads the mind and more or less everything gets memoryholed. Pat Buchanan, I think, once mentioned that the GAE (he referred explicitly to Americans and Brits but it applies to others in the realm) excelled at propaganda and were its greatest purveyors. Others have remarked on how easily propagandized Americans and other Westerners are and how there never has been anything quite the equivalent and that includes North Korea. It is hard to disagree. This has made it quite easy to transition to blatant totalitarianism.
It is why so many of us think that, unfortunately, only empty stomachs and frigid shelter ever will penetrate into the minds of the dutifully ignorant and easily misled. Even then most will not connect the dots to what made them cold and hungry.
Most narrative collapses don’t kill 300,000 people or inflict millions more with short- or long-term debilities ranging from mild and (apparently) temporary to chronic and/or life-threatening. We are only in month 30 since the mRNA jabs were deployed. Collateral damage from such interventions may be measured in years, decades. Oh, and that’s another funny thing…there seems to be very little measurement going on, in fact discussing, much less properly investigating these issues seems to be strongly discouraged. But when a 24-year-old NFL player has a heart attack on the field, or numerous other incidents, it’s hard to hide that something very bad is ongoing.
I wonder sometimes if people have some kind of special compartment in their minds for official “truth” that is a bit different from the ones they use for truths like “the garden hose is leaking”, “my car is hard to start”. People will make sensible plans to cope with an unreliable car like getting a rental or taking a cab if they have something important like a job interview to get to. Somehow the idea that the government is lying about a war where real people are dying though… It’s like realizing that there’s a plot hole in some dumb action movie they like. Somehow it doesn’t matter as much even though, in the real world, it matters a lot *more*. It seems to be fine with many people when large parts of “reality” turn out to be a hallucination. You would think they’d start asking who put the LSD in their coffee but somehow they don’t care.
That’s a great hypothesis. I suspect information overload reinforces the hierarchy of importance and by sheer volume limits the importance of accuracy to the immediate. The car situation is more immediate and the distant war is abstract, so getting the first right is paramount. Although, again, Covid was immediate for many and the obvious lies were brushed aside like those told about the distant war.
I was actually thinking more of Covid but for some reason the best example I could think of was the various war lies. There’s nothing too mysterious about people ignoring the government lying about bombing peasants in the Middle East. When they’re telling you that you can’t go to the store because of a viral bogeyman or that you need to let them inject you with mystery sauce because of that – and you don’t question it… That requires an explanation.
To me the obvious explanation is, well, religion. Religions have always asked people to make sacrifices large and small for the sake of things whose reality was, shall we say, a bit dubious. Was the Covid scam the first sacrament of a sinister new civic religion? If this is correct the next ritual will be even more deranged and damaging.
Whenever I’m tempted to go this far into the conspiratorial mindset though I remind myself that our rulers are probably just too stupid to invent a new religion and Covid was probably just a giant feminine chimpout over nothing. We can also take some comfort in the fact that, even if Covid was meant as some kind of new loyalty sacrament, the current incompetent ruling class will surely make such a fiasco of the Next Big Thing that it will completely backfire and end their rule.
Pozy, they didn’t merely fail to question injecting the mystery sauce, they were EAGER, not only to take it, but to judge others for abstaining.
Something had happened to these folks before covid ever came along. Usually we just call it mind virus, or point to the Milgram experiment or something. Maybe it’s impossible for some schlep like me to pin it down any firmer than that.
But I have a suspicion phones are involved
Back in the early 70s I was a pre-teen who enjoyed MAD magazine. I remember one gag had the famous Lincoln quote: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time.” There’s a photo of Nixon. He’s saying “Now I’m going to make a liar out of Lincoln.”
(This probably predates Watergate.) But my point: In iocus, veritas.
May be difficult to memory hole this one…too many narrative collapses have happened recently — Covid and “the jab” still underway. At some point, even the dumbest normie is going to wake up because they’re starting to hit like Russian Kalibers.
To coin a phrase, one exposure is an accident, two is incompetence. We’re on number three or four…at some point narrative collapse equals regime collapse.
Hrrrrrrrmmmmmmm.
I wonder if the entire narrative media complex isn’t in a state of collapse, Z?
It took me a couple weeks to finally concede that shenannigans blew the last US election. I suspected the Covid caper the second it came out, and confirmed it about 24 hours in. (Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity). The second I heard of the Uke war I fact checked it and saw right through it. Within hours I was splitting a gut laughing when the photo-ops of young Uke hotties and old Baba’s with AK47’s came out, with them vowing to water their flowers with Russian blood.
When something like this breaks, and the con is being set up – the first thing I do is check out the people laying the groundwork. I go on Wiki and other sites and if ANY of those guys are jew, media flaks, crazies, or establishment fart catchers…the shields go up and the phaser beams are brought to bear.
I still get burned once in awhile but not like I used to. From my vantage point out here in the outhouse… the only people still under the sway of the narrative machine are the elderly, the true believers, and the idiots…. and even they are starting to see the light.
The Covid “tell” for me was of two fold. One, the modeling of predicted deaths by the discredited British academic, Neil Ferguson, who has *never* been correct yet in any predictions. The second was the insistent conflation of the death rates across age groups in the narrative when it was known from the get go to be a deadly disease of the old and co-morbid. This was known, but ignored, by Feb/Apr of 2020.
Both of the above were used to panic the citizenry (of whatever country) into ceding their most basic rights—most of which have not been retaken by any meaningful change in law, simply suspended for the present—while more subtle insults proceed aplenty (see: WHO’s grab for world authority when they declare the next pandemic)
Compsci, my favorite “tell” was that when the BLM riots coincided with the lockdowns and no one mentioned that many of the non-white protesters and rioters did not wear masks.
If the elites really believed in BLM and c0vi1d, then they would have found it intolerable that all those precious black lives were being endangered by c0vi1d.
It still makes me laugh.
I seem to recall that it was said at the time that the health risk to vibrants at the hands of white oppression was greater than the health risk of covid, as justification
You know, science
In both cases the “threat” was next to nil.
From day one, that stank like an obese man on a nothing but sausage diet launching a silent but deadly with a little something extra for the crowd leaking out.
My confirming sign was when New York city announced triumphantly that they had converted some sports complex to a 500 bed hospital facility, and that some navy ship in the harbor would provide a couple hundred more beds.
A few hundred extra beds in a metropolitan area of well over 9 million people? Acting like that would make a difference in the face of a catastrophic, deadly pandemic confirmed that this was all theater. I was stunned that not a single person I knew mentioned that as the most ridiculous act of kabuki theater they had ever seen.
In June we saw a friend who worked at a hospital at the heart of the NY pandemic in Queens. He said the first month the hospital was over-crowded but mostly with people coming in in a useless panic. He said that since April, the hospital had been a ghost town. He said he was never political but that as a typical NY Jew he had always identified as a Democrat. He said that with the scamdemic, and the Floyd Revolution, he bought his MAGA hat and American flag and that he was going to vote for the first time in his life.
I wonder how many like him turned out to vote for Trump in ’20. I suspect a huge number of people. Brazen narrative (GAE-speak for lying), is outright brazen truth telling. The lie is the admission of the truth is the lie – sometimes printed right on the cover of Time.
NY election results have been trending redder. There are others like him who don’t know anything better to do about their dissatisfaction than vote republican
Pleas post more often Ann.
I will admit – when China first started locking people in their homes and freezing work output from a major steel producing city, I was freaked out. Shoot – would it be unbelievable for the Chinese to have leaked something horribly virulent out of their biolabs? My reasoning is that the Chinese would rather kill most of their workers than risk their economic situation.
However, quickly it became apparent, and my views amended, as this became a tool for control and the ridiculous manipulation of stats. As soon as I saw the made up state of emergencies and the ridiculous body counts, I then fully understood.
I was concerned initially when China first quarantined wuhan city and then the whole province – like what the hell is going on? Then when the media hysteria began to ramp up here, it became quickly pretty obvious it was bulls***. I mean, all they’d been doing was lying about Trump day in and day out for four years, and now I’m supposed to believe the F-ers? No chance – and quite obviously, we’ve been proven right. It’d be nice if Sailer, among others would acknowledge as much.
What did it for me was the mRNA animal trials 10 years earlier..where all the animals died due to destroyed immune systems..Then two longtime friends took the jab and got malignant cancers within 6 months…
The “animals all died” has been a common internet story. As with many stories, it’s not accurate, but it’s got more than a grain of truth.
If I recall correctly, there were early experiments where most or all animals died, but the vaccine under trial was NOT an mRNA. In my scattered reading, I also got the gist that earlier mRNA gene therapies were disappointing in that the desired effect on the body (an immunie response) was relatively weak and of short duration. Additional doses were worse. Instead the research though that vaccines might be more promising. Well, we all now know how well THOSE worked out.
To be honest, I can’t honestly say how much of the above is “true” and perhaps some or all has been revsied to match events. If you’re intersted in this stuff, check out
https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/
… I am an elderly of 92 and I used not to believe much but when COVID hysteria broke out I no longer believe anything. However I am surprised that you put your faith in Wiki (whacky) – to each his own I suppose but I have found them very biased and often wrong …
Ann, it’s nice hear from a grande dame. Has your skepticism caused you any trouble with friends or family?
Wiki is indeed biased, for reasons we need not rehash. However, some aspects of their postings have more potential for truth than others. If your (out of place?) remark is concerning my posting, I only used the biographical aspect of the Wiki for Luttwak. I assume a man who makes his daily bread as a “renown” military analyst would tout his direct experience in the military. I was not surprised to find little.
God bless you grandmother!
‘Grandmother’. lol
You can’t trust anything anymore, but with the internet, you can see what everybody is saying and get a feel for the truth. Not ideal, but it works 😀
To be sure Wikipedia (any source, to be honest) should be suspected for bias with political or other partisan issues. This is especially so in a time where powerfu interests easily corrupt such gateways of information or control. No matter, I find Wiki quite reliable for (say) routine natural science questions. I’ve even sent small donations a few times. No matter how much world Jewry and insane progressives may have corrupted institutions, I’m reasonably sure that the Wikipedia entry about low density lipoprotein is reasonably free of bias 😀
Agreed, but not necessarily wrt your stated example:
“I find Wiki quite reliable for (say) routine natural science questions.”
To wit. The great Wiki scandal of a decade or so ago wrt the Global Warming debate. It was revealed that those agreeing with the “science” had secured high standing as Wiki editors and used that influence to communicate/coordinate with each other to block all perceived contradictory postings or changes to current entries—even those not necessarily disagreeing with the basic premise of the “warmists”, but adding bits of potentially “confusing” information to the narrative.
Nothing is beyond folks who do not value truth over ideology.
I was suspicious of COVID almost immediately. Like the whole thing felt like they were doing an experimental deep fake.
Obviously the disease exists but the people who are casualties were people born in the 1920s and 1930s
After Peach Mints Round 2 flopped, I was wondering what the next Thing was. Not like they could just let it go early in his re-election year with the economy seemingly doing well. So I pretty well knew the moment it dropped.
Trish Regan said the same thing on Fox Business at the time. Her last show. They fired her for that.
I’d like to read or hear something from the online Bigot-osphere about why they were so gung ho about Corona in the early days circa late 2019, as opposed to the mainstream, and then for the most part both sides flipped right past each other around March/April the next year.
The Libtard/maintstream didn’t even give it much thought or coverage at the start, this was even before the Italian left telling people to hug Chinese immigrants in solidarity. My memory is that bigots tended to have a smug “you’ll be sorry for ignoring this” outlook.
I don’t remember exactly when it started getting airtime on RW twitter but the only other time I’d hear much else about it was from acquaintances in the health field because they had some new minor guidelines. Then all of a sudden after new year it was mentioned here and there at work jokingly but was on the level of any other throw away headline about Kanye’s DUI or Tay-Tay’s nip slip or w/e. I played dumb because I didn’t want to be doxxed as an internet racist.
Anyway, I’m tempted to go into more narrative developments about a boring workplace but I’ll skip that, the gist is that I don’t think the dreaded normie cottoned onto the issue properly until much later after the first few lockdowns and clips from China of people collapsing etc. But around the time Libtards got their software update that ‘Covid’ is the Current Thing, the bigot brains trust started to more slowly swap to Corona skepticism, for the most part. This included the fallout between RamZ Paul and Tina that Finnish woman, Red Ice trying to figure out what the correct thing to be hysterical over was, or people chewing out Steve Sailer in his comments. Then this was later followed by anti-vax stuff, truthers, Q shit and so on.
People like to say how this was all cooked up to depose Trump via mail-ins and other extraordinary legal adjustments, but that certainly wasn’t what either side was focused on until maybe just before the election. It’s even contradictory given the initial positions of the Bigot-osphere versus Cloud People.
Why did The Narrative develop the way it did in the Bigot-osphere? The causality is more obvious for the Cloud People.
If Steve Sailer is not ruthlessly torched out of all alternative websites, striped of credibility, and consigned to oblivion, then I have no respect for the Dissident Right and no faith that they will ever lift a finger to do anything.
Steve Sailer is a joke. Here is a man who has been wrong about literally everything he has ever said (including HBD, by the way, but indisputably about Covid and Ukraine), and yet a fair number of dissidents still hold him in some kind of awe. It boggles the mind.
If dissidents have no regard for the truth, then they are merely propounding an alternative narrative which will in its own time collapse, and deservedly so.
In this group, I don’t remember much positive said wrt Sailor. So what is your problem—that his name is mentioned at all? So a DR type must adopt the tactic of “casting into the void” those whom they disagree with? Seems an idea much closer to our Leftist adversaries than a prescription for DR advancement.
I had a major professor in my younger years as a grad student who would sometimes be challenged in class by an out-spoken and sophomoric student. In those halcyon days, he was patient and never lost his cool. He would counter with the student respectfully, then add, “but you have a right to be wrong, let’s move on”.
I give Sailor that right as well.
i have noticed that GAB (for example) has a lot of people – whom i suspect are in their 20s and 30s – that are hyper vigilant to the point of paranoia; and are very quick to attack anyone that is not absolutely pure, ideologically. they signify their disapproval by calling the suspected “spy” a fag.
I’ve commented here upon this type of reaction more than once. Ideological purity has its place, but is inherently *subtractive* whereas a small developing movement must attempt to aim to be *additive*.
I sense I’ve never been persuasive in this admonishment.
” He would counter with the student respectfully, then add, “but you have a right to be wrong, let’s move on”.”
GTFO libertarian
Huh? Can you elaborate? I seem not to be as advanced in understanding as yourself wrt “libertarian” aspect of you comment.
ID, your post brings up an unsettled question for me.
Are people like Sailer, Tucker, Claremont, the American Conservative, Patrick Casey, and Scott Greer gateways or gatekeepers?
Many hardcore radicals, like TRS and William Pierce before them, believe that conservatives who avoid certain topics or seem to pull their punches are our biggest enemies because they dissipate popular energy that could go to more radical ends.
On the other hand, I continue to learn a lot from Steve and he didn’t prevent me from further radicalization. Most people can’t get to where we are in one step.
What did Sailer get wrong about HBD?
LisS,
I would characterize Sailer as neither a gateway nor a gatekeeper, but a day-trader. He found an exploitable market niche by catering to a bunch of disaffected white grumps desperate to hear something different, and he doesn’t go any deeper than that. He never has and never will be ready to play with the big boys. His quest is for personal fame and comfort, and his interests are sportsball and Hollywood. He is no kind of leader of anything.
As far as HBD goes, the problem with this is the ‘B’ part, not the ‘D’ part. It is certainly true that race is real and thus there is nothing wrong with being a race-realist, but modern “biology,” rooted in the false notions of Darwinian evolution, evolutionary psychology, and molecular genetics, is not the right explanatory paradigm with which to understand any of this.
Darwinism seems to be a stumbling block for many people. It is not real, and it is certainly not “science.” It is shallow, 19th century materialist metaphysics. Nobody who claims to be a truth-seeking dissident should make use of a theory rooted in a substratum of two-century-old tartuffery like that.
I would venture further and say that until Dissidentism gets rid of Darwin, HBD, PUA, and atheism, it will be nothing more than a yazoo stream of modernity, not serious and not worth anyone’s time.
Do I misunderstand you, or are you saying biology is not rooted in genetics? Or is ‘molecular genetics” something different?
Not sure ID understands himself. With such a muddled and confused explanation he will win no converts to the movement. Sailorism could not be worse.
I rarely downvote anyone here. As a person with a BS degree (although not in the natural sciences I wiill concede), your offhand dismissal of Darwin marks you, quite frankly, as an ignoramus. As the grad student example just above, you are of course free to believe as you wish. In the case of Darwin and evolution, you are denying that nearly two centuries of science is wrong?
A heuristic I’ve found effective is that gateways move to the right over time, while gatekeepers swim leftwards right behind Cthulhu.
Say what you want about Sailer but he’s 100x better than Curtis Yarvin’s relentless and worthless pilpul
Sailer is kind of a normie himself… just armed with the knowledge of group IQ stats. That’s always been his one big trick and although its a commonplace for us its still a nuclear weapon for hapless normies, boomercon and shitlib alike
So he serves a role for sure.
Personally I think the secular right always leads to a dead end though. I mean you can know the truth, but really who cares? Mouthing the pieties leads to all the rewards and if theres no higher external order to appeal to why say the truth and be martyred for nothing. If were all just hapless collections of random atoms flying through an uncaring rapidly dissolving universe, who even cares what troons and joggers are up to. I say the approved thing at diversity training now and then and it keeps me rich enough to keep all that mess far away from me and mine. Like have another IPA and chill.
This is the iron logic of the comfortable managerial class and it cant be defeated rationally.
Been a long time since I read any Sailer, but he writes very well–no mean thing–and often has interesting things to say about cultural artifacts such as sports, rock n’ roll, and movies. He did a retrospective on The Graduate, which is one of the most interesting columns I’ve ever read.
Ruthlessly torched, eh? Sounds like the Jacobins purging the Girondins or the Bolsheviks purging the Mensheviks.
A tiny ideologically pure cohort of DR’s. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Yep, the inevitable result is “an army of one”. Now where have we heard that before…
I probably wouldn’t be reading this site were it not for Derb and Sailer, but whatever
Remember, the same people that will ‘fight the Russians to the last Ukranian’ will also:
‘fight Russians to the last Finn/Pole/Balt”
and
‘fight Russians to the last… YOUR children”
Crunch down on some tasty crickets and reflect on that.
Eh, no-surrender types are pretty rare, and more often than not not the ones fighting on the line.
The Ukraine narrative cannot just “go away” anymore than the GAE itself can. Unless you think that the GAE is willing to just go away. It has put itself in a position where it has to stand or fall east of the Dnieper.
I sacrificed 5 min of my life to read the Luttwak piece. The Russian offensive near Kiev 15 months ago failed because tanks and other such armored vehicles are obsolete. A Ukrainian offensive will fail for the same reason. That is the lesson of this war. While Luttwak is correct in a sense to invoke the attrition of WWI, he still manages to remain blind to its cause, thus he is unable to imagine what could be its cure, and looks to the wrong remedy.
A person could be excused for fighting the last war, or thinking in terms of it, in the first month of the war. 15 months later, there is no excuse.
I do not understand your reasoning. TPTB made the same point about Afghanistan and Iraq – lines in the sand that we must defend and stake the fate of the empire upon. And the Afghan catastrophe is already forgotten. Hell – we now make deals with the Taliban.
I understand the enmity towards Russia is deeper, but I think the more likely is that this scenario will drift into the background as it no longer suits the fiction.
It’s not about the GAE’s stated mission (which is usually bs anyway). It’s that it can’t back down from a nearer peer without showing its toothlessness. It’s not at all the same thing as failing to nation build in a conquered place. Everybody knew it could flatten Iraq or Afghanistan if it wanted to, but it chose not to. In those places, GAE chose to go in, and it chose to go out. It was never forced in either direction. In Ukraine, on the other hand, somebody is actually able to (so far) resist its will.
It’s kind of like if you’re the big kid at the playground and you pick on a smaller kid without ever destroying him, and he continues to thumb his nose at you. Nobody doubts that you could destroy him if you wanted to, he’s just not considered to be worth the effort. But when it’s a bigger kid who stands up to you…..
Geopolitics is often not more complicated than that
“Everybody knew it could flatten Iraq or Afghanistan if it wanted to”
Everybody knows this how? When has this capacity been demonstrated? At this point and approaching 100 years of lost wars… it all looks like a whole bunch of posturing.
I’d think they were at least as capable as the Union army in the Civil War but they didn’t treat those places nearly as badly as they did the American South.
The US did spend the effort – the bin laden hunt was a catastrophe. IEDs embarrassed the US. Natural cave formations showed the absolute limitation of aerial warfare and satellites – in open country! (High tech beats low tech. Low tech beats high tech – a lesson being shown, not learned, in Ukraine right now)
Yes, in theory we could have dropped nuclear weapons (if they even work anymore), but, short of that, the US seemed impotent.
Worried about civilian casualties = not spending the effort
Dresden, now that was spending some effort. Without nukes btw. Hamburg. Tokyo. Etc. Nor does it take aerial bombardment to flatten a city either. Artillery works fine. Make enough examples, the rest will submit sooner or later.
I’m not saying that’s right or desirable. I’m just saying.
Seems to me that the GAE has less at stake precisely when it doesn’t put boots on the ground (the Ukraine) than when it did (Iraq/Afghanistan), ergo it will be easier to soft peddle and then memory hole the defeat in the Ukraine than in Afghanistan. The GAE can blame the Ukrainian defeat on the Ukes whereas it could do no such thing with the Afghans.
One of Dad’s moral lessons that’s always stayed with me:
In the jungle there are big cats and small cats. The big cats could take the small ones anytime they wanted to. But the reason they don’t is because the cost of doing so is very, very high.
[Although Dad didn’t work in nature, not even close, during his working years he was on not one, but two continents with honest-to-God jungles and suitable felines. I don’t know, but I suspect his story came from one of these places.]
Difference being, the Taliban was never a GAE world hegemon competitor, and never will be.
Russia/China otoh . . . .
In a sense, the GAE has made Ukraine an existential war without having had to. It has sunk its credibility into it (able to defend an ally, able to punish with sanctions, able to dangle the dollar). The rest of the world is quickly learning who is the strong horse and who is the paper eagle.
They thought it was going to be easy and Russia would collapse in the first couple of months. If they’d known what they were in for they wouldn’t have done it. Common theme in many, many wars.
My point is that this is not existential – meaning, from my perspective, the US will not collapse if we withdraw. Yes, is this another sign that the empire is losing hegemonic status – absolutely! But the reason Ukraine will soon be forgotten is because the battle is not existential, though it will continue to erode US power around the world.
The GAE took a geopolitical hit in Afghanistan, just as it will in the Ukraine. But I certainly do not see the outcome in the latter is demonstrably more consequential than the one in Afghanistan. A loss in the Ukraine will not cause the GAE to spontaneously collapse, or anything close to it. More’s the pity.
I agree with all but one point – more’s the pity. I have kids. I fear the world they will know. Say what you will about the GAE and its degeneracy, we have a nice quality of life (even if it has eroded for 50 years). An forward, tho I canna see, I guess an fear!
does EU stay in the GAE if ukraine is lost? is there even an ‘E’ left in that case?
@Eloi:
That’s a sober take. The fall is going to be painful despite the glee many of us will take. Poverty sucks.
Eloi,
Thanks for that bit of Robert Burns with which you conclude your comment.
As you might have deduced, I think this one, if the GAE isn’t able to turn it around, is the Suez moment. No that shouldn’t cause the immediate collapse of the regime, but it will be plain for all to see. Which has consequences.
Other countries will no longer fear the paper tiger. The US will put hits on their leadership, the recalcitrants will respond in kind. The US security apparatus will tighten up on those present in the US. The anaconda will increase our strangulation.
Pretty much. There may be some half-assed defeat disguised as a peace treaty, but it will have the same effect. They really thought the sanctions were a silver bullet and they turned out to be blanks. Dear God that was stupid. I think it will be more like post-Bretton Woods Britain than the Suez Crisis if they can finagle something short of a spectacular loss, but they have proved utterly inept on most things so far.
Oh. but it is far more existential than I think many are willing to admit. Our economy depends on the dollar being force fed throughout the globe. This war is accelerating the dollar’s demise. True, we won’t be a hollowed out Dresden after Allied bombing, but the Great Depression 2.0 is no funland either. Governments have perished for less.
A bit off topic, but I recommend the new Netflix docu-series Chimp
Empire, though I’m dreading the episode where they served cold fries.
Edward Luttwak, who is this guy? He has a Wiki page citation. Seems his only military “experience” might have been a 5 year stint with the Israeli Defense dept in Israel (((???))). Notably absent is a combat record, military rank, or leadership experience. Basically, Edward Luttwak reads like a wannabe academic military analyst. I don’t believe he’d have enough qualification to teach in any war college.
Compare this to notables like Col Douglas McGregor who regularly speaks on the Ukrainian conflict, then decide who is believable and who is a shill.
He is an old Cold Warrior who has outlived his contemporaries and maintains a very sharp mind into his old age. Interestingly enough, he is also friends with BAP, from his days at Yale and beyond.
That was not particularly my point. My point was not that he has no track record of military commentary, just that he has no modern (or perhaps any) military experience wrt to actual combat in the field of battle, yet feels competent to lecture the public and more importantly, others who do.
These are the *worse* type of academics—credentialed, yet with no real life experience in what they teach. He is at best, a military historian attempting to apply long past historical lessons onto modern situations of which he directly knows little. I’m sure, if we were talking about Victor David Hansen, he’d be pilloried in a heartbeat. 😉
I would really like to think that just as the Russians ruined Bonaparte’s dreams of a Jacobin imperium, this bloody fiasco will be the ruin of the “american” empire.
What the US is doing in Ukraine is beyond evil.
No, not beyond evil. It is SOP fo the GAE. I remember the Vietnam debacle. We did the same thing, more or less. We convinced a country to sacrifice themselves in our interest. When the war effort—which we directed—failed, we cut and ran. Ukraine will be no different, except that their enemy, Russia, will perhaps be a bit more gentle in their treatment of fellow slav’s (after the appropriate handling of Ukraine’s corrupt leadership and their NAZI henchmen).
On 2 November 1963, the president of South Vietnam, Diem, was arrested and assassinated…
On 22 November 1963 POTUS John F. Kennedy was assassinated…
And I ask you, who put the palettes of bricks in the big cities for the St. George rioters to hurl in our modern day days of broken glass?
Who?
Good points. I do hope that Lincoln, down in hell, is proud of the monster he and the republican party birthed.
But how many of those Vietnamese took their millions in corruption and fled to Israel?
With the Ukraine narrative starting to collapse, will Normie have any skepticism toward the narrative that will be advanced to justify a war with China over Taiwan or Chinese claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea? I hope Normie will be skeptical but I doubt it. Remember when Kabul was going to hold for two years?
Remember when Covid was going to kill us all unless we wore our masks in our cars and took the clot shot? Remember flatten the curve? Remember I did not have sexual relations with that woman? Remember Gulf of Tonkin? Remember WMD’s? Remember we came we saw he died? Remember POW’s in ‘nam? Remember transient inflation? Remember Bear Stearns? Remember the kids of thalidomide? Remember no boots on the ground? Remember…
Not being snarky – just trying to illustrate the normalcy bias – things keep getting worse, and Normie is still asleep.
Remember, “We are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”, ???
Ask the Vermont social workers how that worked out or the doughy white political activists in Minnesota how importing Somalia is working out?
If it weren’t for that Churchillian Hero Zelensky we’d all be speaking Russian now
Zelensky is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being that has ever lived…
The shorter list would be what did the Regime NOT lie about?
. . . I got nothing.
Hmmm, lemme see. Woodrow Wilson campaign plank, ‘keep our boys out of war…’
Uh, nope.
Hmmm, lemme see. Hidden Cripple Roosevelt campaign plank, ‘keep our boys out of war…’
Uh, nope.
Saddam’s yellow cake? The Huns are bayoneting Belgian infants. Hell, the Turks bayoneting Bulgarian infants during the Seige of Plevna, 1877? Lusitania?
Nope, more nope.
Trump “Russian collusion?”
Oh look, the Durham wheels of justice grind conveniently slow…. nope.
Remember “the South started the war because they fired on Fort Sumter”?
Eloi –
Speaking of POW’s left behind in ‘Nam – here’s a direct witness of that: https://youtu.be/JeF9HAQo3Oo
Apparently the last guy shot down in ‘Nam was a former Blue Angel flight leader & the North Vietnamese & Russians kept him because of his celebrity status. His wife was severely maltreated by both John Kerry & John McStain. Told her to “shut up about it” in a congressional hearing.
It’ll make your blood boil. It does this Veteran’s to this day. And he put in 38yrs active service.
Disgusting. The audio spy spikes that could be programmed and were used by captured pilots entering their id always made me sick. Can you imagine the desperation and possible hope when they found those spikes as they entered their information. Then for piece of filth like mcstain and kerry to cover it up and parade arpund as heroes. Wicked.
Remember the Lusitania. Remember the Maine. That rabbit hole goes incredibly deep, and SHOCKINGLY is coextant with democratic-ish governments. I’m sure there was some trireme the dastardly whatevers sank that the Athenians were clammoring about in the streets.
Normie just has to keep the MIC’s hands off his children. He can sit in front of the tube, get fat and munch chips after that.
Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Narrative Collapse
“You can’t fix stupid” is another aphorism firmly grounded in ancient truth.
The reason the narrative industry exists is because it works. We have become a nation of gullible idiots who slavishly monitor their cell phones as the primary window onto the world. We swallow endless bits of propaganda flowing through this portal like an invisible mind virus eating away at primal cognition skill. Tens of millions of Americans voting to put a dementia patient in the White House, and those chickens have come home to roost, but normie remains glued to the couch. The Left is selling bullshit and the Right is selling fantasy, but the customers can’t get enough of it. And so, no one trusts anyone else, and for good reason. It’s impossible to know who is terminally stupid and who can still tie their shoelaces.
This can only be fixed with a collapse, return of real hardship and the ancestral existential gauntlet. Faster is better.
“We have become a nation of gullible idiots who slavishly monitor their cell phones as the primary window onto the world. ”
The propaganda machine long predates the cell phone. We have been fed a steady diet of lies, half-truths and emotional rhetoric since at least the 1940s, but probably even longer than that.
At least the cell phone offers a chance at learning some truth for those who seek it. The Z-Blog would be a mimeographed monthly newsletter mailed to a few hundred people at most. Or maybe the podcast would be mailed via reel to reel or compact cassette to a few hundred people once a month.
Things rarely get better by getting worse. The pressure to conform would be even higher. The Great Depression did not produce a great uprising of the unwashed. Instead, a cult of FDR was created.
“ At least the cell phone offers a chance at learning some truth for those who seek it. ”
Only for those with the ability to *reason*. Logical thinking is an absolute prerequisite to such understanding/learning in a climate of competing narratives. Unfortunately this ability limits Z-man’s audience and effectiveness. How much is the current unknown.
I say we’ve not reached maximum effectiveness. But it’s out there somewhere. The situation is fluid.
William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press. The pamphleteers of the American Revolution. Probably Jacobins. Political graffiti in ancient Greece and Rome.
Reminded me of ‘Brian’ (Graham Chapman) scrawling graffiti in bad Latin and being corrected like an errant schoolboy by the Centurion (John Cleese).
Yes! Vintage Python humo[u]r. I “get” it, but probably is funnier for someone who had a “classical education.” Is that even available any more?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8
Fine, fine. So the sail foam allows for greater dissemination of info, for better and for worse. At the end of the day, however, I’m convinced constant use of the sail foam–addiction?–atrophies the mind and makes people stupider. And that is unlikely to be a good thing.
Dopamine ‘diction
Interferes with cognition:
The…Screen…Is…NOT…Good…!
Tars – the key to successful indoctrination is consistency of message and repetition. Nothing in our specie’s history can compete with the cell phone as an instrument of repetition. Most young people today are glued to the damn thing on a near continuous basis. And it stimulates three sensory organs simultaneously (vision, hearing, and touch interface using finger dexterity for control) which is a force-multiplier in terms of brain re-wiring. And it’s changing our skill sets in fundamental ways. Most young men that I know couldn’t change a tire if their life depended on it, but they can call AAA in a fraction of a second.
The only people who fear the collapse are the ones that know they won’t make it to the other side.
After the revolution, no one under the age of majority will be allowed a sail foam with internet/social media access, period. As a matter of fact, you may have to be a land holder and tax payer in order to have one…
If the Depression had produced such an uprising, we very likely would have become some English-speaking analog of the Soviet Union. Based upon my (admittedly scant) knowledge of American history, the elite were worried precisely about such a revolt.
I’m a student of enough world history to know that popular revolutions almost always leave most people worse off. Oftentimes, much worse.
No one tries to “fix stupid”. Stupid is propped up, promoted and celebrated. America- Land of the Gullible, home of the Stupid.
Thank You,
A. Phreeloter
The narrative exists to enlist support.
In the states, who did the narrative enlist? It enlisted the professional class and their youth. In other words, people who would forfeit their future existence in the name of a violent criminal who overdosed on drugs after resisting arrest. People who gleefully cheer the dissolution of the borders to their homeland. People who probably don’t have the concept of a homeland and thus can’t see the slow motion ethnic cleansing they perpetrate against themselves. People who fall over themselves to celebrate man-on-man sodomy and kink as a high virtue. People who fall over themselves to celebrate and promote genital mutilation on all children. People who are anti-war but who support any war they are told to support so long as it furthers their sense of compassion. People who fall all over themselves to garnish their LinkedIn posts with primitive language dictums to show that they are in full support of the current non-white cultural month. You have to show you are qualified to lead!
Who rejects the narrative? The people whose families have supplied the empire with its virile, loyal fighting force for generations and those who would for the first time. The people who constitute the real nation.
The empire can’t bolster a single client state in a border dispute with a supposed lesser power. In that failing, the entire world has seen that the empire doesn’t even have a nation behind it – certainly not a nation that is in any way formidable. The best it can do is replace the nation with an endless rabble with eons of failure, subservience and destitution as its calling card. It can only do so by inducing the invasion’s hordes with the fulfilled promise of the dispossessed wealth of the real nation.
Who waits in the wings? A man who puts on the little hat and flies to a foreign nation to sign away the most sacrosanct right of his people. A host of aliens with no historical tie to the construction of the nation – who accrued their wealth via its weakening and ultimate destruction. Another host of aliens who accrue power by appealing to a constituency of aliens whose hatred of the nation and its people and their desire for the scraps of their dispossession is their sole motive for power – a rabble of grave dancers.
Say what you will about Trump, he is American, he loves the country, and he does want to save it. He just doesn’t know who to appoint who shares that goal and is capable of coordinating the successful administration of its salvation. He is too afraid to put front and center the people who constitute the nation.
There is no cavalry coming. We’re going to have to save ourselves.
I wish that I could add something, but your comment is so thorough and eloquent, I can but express my sincere admiration. Well and truly said, sir!
The “left” was not anti-war. It was just anti wars waged by republican presidents. Vietnam turned out to be the exception that proves this rule, but even in that case, the left’s anti war fervor didn’t ramp up to its full height until the democrat left office and the republican came in. Since then, there have been no exceptions.
Jeff, that’s a bit of a stretch wrt history as I lived through it. The antiwar sentiment began effectively under LBJ. It was LBJ’s direction of the war effort that got us almost 700k soldiers in Vietnam—and—the Tet offensive. Tet broke the back of the narrative and caused LBJ to reverse course and state on television to the nation that ‘…I will not seek nomination for the presidency, nor will I accept my party’s nomination. If nominated, I will not run, If elected, I will not serve…’.
Nixon, easily won election with his “secret plan” to end the war. His plan however was to “escalate” the war and the anti-war folk knew they were had when he did just that. The anti-war movement continued to grow admittedly, but is started under LBJ and was effective enough to run him out of office. It was not effective enough to stop Nixon—who had lost more soldiers than LBJ—from re-election.
Just so, Compsci. The vitriol the Left heaped upon LBJ was not unlike what they did to Trump. Then again, I’ve never shed a ruddy tear for LBJ.
The Left, particularly the New Left, opposed any war waged by whites, and especially war against non-whites. Now that AINO is effectively a non-white nation, the Left’s anti-war fervor is decidedly muted. The Left’s attitude toward war is determined by its anti-white racism.
That’s why they love the Ukraine War so much, whites slaughtering other whites in a pointless meatgrinder that could have been easily negotiated if not for our meddling. That sort of butchering is what they wish they could do if they hadn’t been pumped full of soy estrogen.
As I put on my tinfoil hat (an act that seems more and more reliable as time passes) I see a possible end game in all this. As AINO gins up foreign conflict after foreign conflict, the very people who might be enlisted to fight back the POC hoards streaming across the Rio Grande will be sent to fight for “democracy” across the globe. This will be a fine opportunity (after deputizing said POC hoard) to suddenly go door to door confiscating firearms, with only old farts like myself to make them pay a little for their actions. Then again, it beats dying in a home being mistreated by Shaqneesha and Jerome.
Who supports? Those who either think they will gain, or those who think they are exempt from losing.
I should have chosen arms dealing as a career path way back when.
“Arms dealer.” Hmmmm…Here’s a flashback from my childhood: I lived in several different Northern Virgina neighborhoods growing up (1960s-70s).One of these could be fairly described as “working class CIA neighborhood.” I wasn’t even ten, and that would describe at least three or four of the families whose kids I played with. Their dad worked for the government. So what?
Fast forward 10 or 12 years, to ca. 1980. My parents are long retired. We’re up late watching Nightline with Ted Koppel. His guest that night was — you guessed it — an international arms trader. He was live via satellite from somewhere in Africa. I don’t remember the entire interview, but one part that’s stuck with me. He said he’d gotten a phone call that just said “If you leave the country tonight, no one will stop you.” The guest was Mr. X, former spook, now a rogue arms trader. I used to play with his boys. 🙂
Why do people still put total faith in what mainstream media says about this conflict? To hear normally sane, rational folks regurgitate the latest NYT/WaPo/MSNBC talking point as if they have received the Gospel, or ancient tome of wisdom is amazing. They truly feel like these regime reporters and pundits are sitting in the strategic planning room and receiving the straight facts directly from field generals.
Many seem to have learned nothing from the last 20+ years of war reporting from the OEF/OIF in the middle east. During my time there, it was almost comical to occasionally catch a segment from CNN or Fox News and see what the latest (according to them) developments and actions were supposedly occurring. In many instances, the information was either outdated, incorrect, or just flat-out absurd. Then, just as now, I am sure reporters merely took the media briefing sheet from the public affairs officer in the morning and wrote the news according to those guidelines.
“They truly feel like these regime reporters and pundits are sitting in the strategic planning room and receiving the straight facts directly from field generals.”
I haven’t watched since they made the movie, “Operation Desert Storm.” I think they believe this because that is how the narrative is presented – this is the word straight from the War Room. In fact, the news desk is dressed up as the War Room. It was at least in Year 0 of The End of History.
RealityRules,
I cannot remember who the reporter was, but one of the funniest scenes from last year during a WH briefing was when the Pentagon official finished reading off the briefing page on the Ukraine conflict and asked if there were any questions. The reporter, who I if I recall correctly was from a foreign outlet, merely asked, “How do we know that info is correct?” The look from the Pentagon spokesman reminded me of the orphanage scene in Oliver! when he asked for another bowl of soup. “Because I told you” was his response.
The video was surely memoryholed cause I can’t find it with numerous word searches. The reporter was a veteran American journo who laughed when Sullivan went on to accuse him of being Putin’s pawn.
Ned Price being grilled by Matt Lee.
“Why do people still put total faith in what mainstream media says about this conflict?”
Because they put total faith in what mainstream media said about the scamdemic. It’s the same morons. Sadly, that’s most Americans. They will never admit they were duped. And still are.
“To hear normally sane, rational folks regurgitate the latest NYT/WaPo/MSNBC talking point as if they have received the Gospel, or ancient tome of wisdom is amazing.”
This is the part that has so deeply demoralized me. I thought sane, rational folks (friends and family to boot) would see thru the bullshit. Instead, they swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and some called me an evil bastard worthy of the camps for thinking otherwise.
I have washed my hands of it all. Let it burn.
Yep, people are lazy and stupid. That’s harsh, but really is not meant as such. I have noted before that such was myself a decade or so ago, and certainly even more so when I was a young man.
What is essential in the meaning of our lives? Family, friends, community, perhaps religion—not national/world politics. I give most folks a pass in that, with such priorities, they tend to go light on matters not under their control.
Arthur wonders, “Why do people still put total faith in what mainstream media says about this conflict?”
The liberals and progressives I know are addicted to the feelings of smug superiority that they get when they listen to and repeat NPR, MSNBC, Colbert, …
They have been programmed by those who control the media to see NPR/MSNBC as the coolest of cool kids and people can join the cool kids club by listening to and repeating the message. Then, they radiate smugness.
The actual content being communicated is almost secondary to the act of joining the cool kids club by listening to and repeating the message.
I’ll conclude with a recent episode with one of my friends. He was going on a rant of righteous rage about how we aren’t doing enough to combat climate change. I calmly pointed out that Al Gore, in his movie, predicted that certain parts of the country would be underwater by now. My friend exploded in indignation that I would mention that. He said in a mocking tone, “Oh, so Al Gore was just a few years off. So what?!”
The self-righteous ranting is funny. I was on a walk with my dad and chatting with some guy in his yard, and the guy just starts going on about how Dominion voting machines are perfectly 100% secure. This had literally nothing to do with the price of tea in China, I think all I had said was something about how housing prices had gone up quite a bit in the neighborhood.
I see this sort of monomaniacal fixation in only three kinds of people: lefties, religious wackos, and someone who has to go to the bathroom really badly.
Reminds me of when I was having lunch with a couple of shitlib friends some years ago, I think it was 2019. We weren’t talking about politics at all, and for some reason the name Donald Trump came out of my friend’s mouth, came out practically as a snarl, he was suddenly so angry, evidently at the mere thought of him.
This is an important clue, thanks.
He’s making the same connections as you are, sub-consciously, but the morality filter of the conditioned corpus callosum (Freud’s “superego”) is preventing him from verbalizing a hypothesis.
In boys, we call such behavior ‘acting out’. Girls too, as Heartiste noted, acting contrary to what their hindbrain demands.
For example, someone did a closeup of the pretty CNN brunette sparring with Trump, and noted her pupils were fully dilated- she was actually getting turned on by his attitude.
(Addendum: *housing prices going up, as the consequence of a stolen election, in a war on Whites)
Actually, those three kinds of people were likely embodied in that one fellow. How so? Well, he was clearly a leftist, but as The Narrative is analogous to fervent belief in a religious catechism, that assimilates the religious fanatic. But how about the third kind, how is that accounted for? Well, needing to go to the bathroom really badly is an expression of a sub-rational, compelling need. Bear with me here; the Australians have a wonderful phrase that wraps together malice, deception, and sub-rational compulsion, and that is when someone is said to be pissing in your pocket. So here you have a rabid leftist, spouting The Narrative, not truly meant to convince, but to overwhelm, and being driven through malice to stoop to deception about their good intentions, pointedly disrespecting and discounting your views, and attaining gloating, gloriously sanctimonious release at your entire expense by metaphorically pissing in your pocket, a container of your valuables.
Okay, a bit of a stretch, admittedly…
Heh
It’s especially see the likes of space lawyer Glenn Reynolds and his cast of boomer neocons at Instapundit breathlessly repeat the MSM and ISW bullshit.
Its a shame Luttwak has jumped on this train. He should have known better, but I guess very old hatreds die hard.
To those impatient with the decline of the GAE, these narratives are important to propping up The People In Charge. Once normal people begin to notice there is not an ounce of truth to their statements, a few more will peel off to this side.
Fast Eddy Luttwak – color me shocked. It’s nice to see all of these bogus narratives foisted on us, collapse. The real problem is that those who are doing the foisting and the subsequent damage aren’t paying any real price at all, other than maybe a bit of sullied reputation. That’s not good enough and must change.
Ok, so then what will be the next Flag Emoji in my Twitter Profile?
If I were a betting man:
Turkey +200
Belarus +800
Taiwan +1500
Sudan +20,000
Israel +6,000,000
At those odds I would take that Sudan bet
Perfidious Chinee!
#WeStandWithTaiwan
Not sure but always keep the GAE flag first and most prominent.
It is tough to keep up with the ever increasing number of stripes and colors put on it.
A rainbow encircling a tranny exposing himself to a 5-year-old boy?
The “jackboot on the neck” is preferable.
We tend to think of “The Narrative,” as a more recent invention, but it has antecedents in the time before America went completely insane. I think the First Gulf War—while not an internet hit—did give Americans the sense that war no longer had to be painful, at least for Americans. You could watch it through an NVG green filter on TV and there wouldn’t be any pesky body bags, like in the Vietnam War. Hell, there weren’t even any people. There were just phosphorus white rounds streaking through a sky and hitting buildings in a mostly abandoned city. It came down to who had the better Tom Clancy toys, and we had put a man on the moon only a couple decades before, so naturally we would always win.
There are lots of dumb people in intelligence and military strategy, and even dumber people in the universities willing to amplify their dumbness (and that’s before you even get to the abyss of stupidity that is the media.) Still, some of these people are able to think long-term and do have long memories—being born before the internet cellphone fried attention spans—and I think they’re still high off how that “war” panned out, and went literally according to script. They’re like the degenerate gambler whose system worked once to earn them a couple hundred dollars, willing to shift their life savings to their checking account so they can hit the ATM at the casino and prove it wasn’t all a fluke. Putin isn’t Sadam but after the cocktail waitress brings your tenth shot to the table, if you squint hard enough you can kind of make it work.
> We tend to think of “The Narrative,” as a more recent invention, but it has antecedents in the time before America went completely insane.
The U.S. has been extremely effective in controlling “The Narrative”, for ages, especially with regards to war. Lincoln jailed journalists without blinking, and FDR went so far as to create the FCC to ban anti-war radio host Coughlin as he prepped for WWII (using the excuse of anti-semitism, showing how little some things change). When the man kept up his mailing pamphlets, the post office refused to send them.
Freedom of the Press has only really been a thing in times when consolidation of power has already happened and is irreversible, so the people can only just quibble about the details.
The system idolizes the two most bloodthirsty maniacs to ever hold the presidency, FDR and Lincoln. Everyone on the left loves FDR and the right loves Lincoln. They’ve spun narratives turning these men into heroes of the republic.
The left loves Lincoln, too. Only criticism I’ve ever heard of him (Thomas DiLorenzo; Mel Bradford) came from the right….
You say that the right loves Lincoln. Well, at the Z blog we’re pretty far right, I’d say, but we know better than to say anything in defense of old Abe here. That his policies were a disaster for the country’s future is a case that can be made, but ‘a bloodthirsty maniac?’ Come on.
I call starting a completely unnecessary war killing 600,000, bloodthirsty, not to mention a tyrant. Not to mention so much of the South raped, pillaged and destroyed.
He basically killed the republic and gave us an empire.
Arthur “Scud Stud” Kent, is like unto a god to me…
“We tend to think of “The Narrative,” as a more recent invention, but it has antecedents in the time before America went completely insane.”
Warning: Bible verses lol
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Yeah, Narrative. Fun stuff!
The ’91 Gulf War was indeed about the worst thing that could have happened to the GAE. Imbued it with an unwarranted sense of invincibility. Led to recklessness. And now here we are 30 years later in Ukraine.
Yes, but there was a second lesson for all to see, who would see. That the military failed to “win the peace”. The military defeat and occupation of Iraq (Gulf War deux) gained us nothing, but lost treasure and American lives.
The concept of “nation building” as we practiced it was a complete and total failure which produced no lasting beneficial effect and arguably left a *negative* effect. Why this was as compared to Japan, Germany, and Korea has been debated here before. I’ll not rehash.
We learned the wrong lesson from WW2. They think Afghanistan is Germany and Iraq is Japan. The thing they leave out is both Germany and Japan were advanced civilized people before the war. All that really happened is they accepted that they lost and moved on and back to the way they used to live, civilized. The system we imposed didn’t really matter. They reverted back to the people they were.
Instead, they believed they turned barbarians into democrats.
Just as they believe they can turn “African-American” savages into devotees of Plato, Mozart, Shakespeare and Cezanne.
Tars, exactly. There are no functioning democracies with national IQ’s under 90, albeit no one has adequately explained India to my satisfaction. The entire Middle East is baseline in that (national IQ) respect. Toss in a pernicious religious inclination to Islam and you’ve got a recipe for failure.
Goldberg doesn’t really give any ground on the Russia hoax though. His is almost “well all those lies were for a noble cause of stopping that no good liar Trump.” As with French and others, he doesn’t seem to think this impacts his own credibility at all.
He’s not wrong – you can’t impact what doesn’t exist.
The Western propaganda machine has led Dmitry Medvedev to some absolutely glorious quips that makes Trump sound outright restrained.
https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1658373339096686592
“A certain person calling himself the president of France said that Russia had already lost geopolitically, and was transforming into the other countries’ vassal.
The president of the Republic was obviously harmed by socializing with the Kiev junkie.
He inhaled too much of the warm Paris air mixed with Ukrainian cocaine waste, that his guest was emitting.”
“A certain person calling himself [office name] of [country name]” is a great turn of phrase. Western “leadership” in a nutshell.
Yes, that’s a devlish little barb, alright. Brandon Bidet is the president of France.
Narrative collapse? The people following the narrative they don’t care. They’ll find some way to justify everything. I mean we’ve seen it with covid, with masks, with the Durham report, with Russia collusion, with Ukraine. This list could go on and on. The only thing that will bring them to reality is hard reality. It’s very sad for all of us.
Yes, that’s the rub, isn’t it. The Ukraine narrative will collapse and a week later will never be spoken of again.
And no one will pay a price.
Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken, the whole Neocon crew will count their money made on the Ukraine affair and move on to the next narrative, probably “China bad.”
It will all start over again because we are ruled by a foreign elite who have zero accountability to any other group – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. – in this country. Their rule is absolute. No one dare even mention their name much less challenge them politically.
Politically, we are all peasants with little say in how the country is ruled and no say when it comes to any issue that our rulers consider of any importance to them.
Bu…bu…but…what about our Democracy?
We absolutely have the right to pick whichever one of the two candidates that our foreign rulers choose. 😉
I’ve actually seen some retention about the Covid lying–a teeny, tiny amount but still some–and that is quite the outlier. Otherwise I completely agree. It will take cold and hunger (which are coming) and even then few dots will be connected.
And, to be fair, there is widespread consensus and acceptance that most things are lies.
TomA has apparently missed his cue. So I’ll ad-lib some lines in his style.
Cold and hunger can be highly motivating. Dots will be connected, scores settled. The antibodies will arise to the long overdue job of eliminating the pathogens. Then, and only then, can the body begin to heal.
The Duran guys have been calling it the spring summer autumn winter, spring summer autumn winter , spring summer autumn winter offensive.
“Der Manstein Kommt!”
Excited rumours ran round the Sixth Army. ‘Manstein is coming!’ soldiers said to each other, almost like the Easter greeting of the Orthodox Church.
Stalingrad – Antony Beevor.
Jedem das Seine
Despite Beevor, I think that most German troops in the Stalingrad pocket were hoping for relief by Colonel General Hermann “Papa” Hoth, in immediate command of the failed relief effort.
Well, who in their right mind would listen to Simon LeBon’s geopolitical pronouncements? Then again, perhaps the “Rio” he sang about back in the eighties actually referred to the Dnieper…
Well people are hungry like the wolf for information from wild boys, so . . . . . . .
I mean it’s a reflex.
What they really want is a view to a kill, with Putler in the gunsites.
another narrative collapse is the one for covid. all the columns of the temple seem to be crashing down at the same time…
Yes, for our side, and for some normies. But have you seen images coming out of certain government offices, and progressive Democrat gatherings? Masks still abound.
They won’t let go of 2020, where the twin “crises” of Floyd and Covid gave these deranged little mutants a taste of what they consider sense and purpose in their otherwise sad, media-addicted, bugman lives. 2020 was the height of their power. It’s been downhill for them since then. The mask reminds them of the power they once had.
it’s funny, for some people the masks are now little face flags.
Luttwak was a Cold War strategist we all read and took seriously in the 80s. After reading his current nonsense, we’re lucky the Red Army didn’t take over the world.
I’d rather listen to the wisdom o’ Ludwig von Drake…