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Imagine a scenario in which there are two people talking. Person A says, “I am very thirsty” and Person B responds, “There is a store around the corner.” Now imagine a member of the secret police reading these lines in a transcript without any other information about the people. Stripped of all context, these sentences do not mean anything, and they are not obviously connected to one another. They could easily be viewed as random sentences or perhaps coded messages.
Of course, both Person A and Person B would understand the exchange because the receiver of the first message had a lot of other information. Maybe he knew that Person A had been exercising or that it was a hot day. That is why he mentioned that there was a store around the corner. Of course, Person A understood the response because he knew that Person B understood what he meant. These sentences made sense to both parties because of shared knowledge.
As an aside, secret messages work the same way. The messages are designed to make sense only within a specific context. The sender assumes the receiver will have the key that provides the context. Often, the key is the context that makes the messages intelligible. To someone without the key, the message is meaningless gibberish. In more sophisticated codes, the receiver needs the key as well as the larger context of the message.
Getting back to the example, that exchange is something called the cooperative principle, a concept from linguistics. The parties in a casual conversation rely upon a commonly held set of assumptions. In most situations, the listeners and speakers act cooperatively to facilitate communication. They mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. There is an assumed base of shared information upon which their exchange rests.
This describes the cooperate principle of communication. The four maxims of this principle are quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Quantity is the amount of information communicated to the other parties. The quality of that information is the truthfulness of what is being communicated. Relevance is the relationship of the information to the topic or situation. Manner is the clarity of communication. Grice’s maxims explain how people efficiently communicate to one another.
This structure for how people communicate is vitally important in a society in which the people are expected to participate in the governing of society. In a monarchy, horizontal relationships are subordinate to the vertical social structures. One does not have to understand the king in order to understand the relationship. The customs and social structures provide most of what the king would ever need to communicate to the people and what the people need to communicate to one another.
In other words, in an aristocratic system, the context so dominates the daily life of the people that verbal communication is reduced to the pragmatic. There is no need to discuss, much less debate abstract concepts that require lots of additional information in order to make sense to the participants. In a democracy, those clear social structures are gone and what must replace them is a large common understanding. Everyone has to operate from the same set of truths and assumptions.
This gets to why America is in such an agitated state, despite the relative peace and prosperity of the age. The people in charge seem like they are not just speaking a different language but doing so from a different reality. That is because for the most part, they are using a different language and they do operate in a different world from the bulk of the people. The managerial class is defined by the managerial elite and therefore operates by a different cooperative principle.
Take the word “democracy” which is used all the time by the regime. To normal people, this means majority rule. In a democracy, the government does what the majority of the people want, with some exceptions. Normal people accept that some things like slavery are not up for debate. Even if the majority wants to bring back slavery, it is an immoral practice, so it is not permitted. Otherwise, normal people assume democracy is the will of the people expressed in the laws.
To the managerial elite, democracy means the process by which the majority or an assumed majority is convinced to support elite opinion. This is why they are inspired to redouble their efforts whenever they lose at the ballot box. Democracy requires them to work harder to get their desired result. Expediency may require them to go around this process using the courts or administrative fiat. The assumption is that enough people already agree so it is close enough to justify action.
This one word shows how the elite and the commoners do not share the same basis of understanding when it comes to politics. The elites see democracy as the process of working toward their desired end. The people assume it is the process by which elites discover the common will. These are two entirely different and incompatible views of the democratic process. Inevitably this leads to a large number of words and concepts lacking a shared understanding.
More critically, the managerial elite deliberately flouts the principle of commonality to trick the people into supporting the opposite of what they desire. Normal people are used to flouting the principle of commonality, as it is a central part of comedy, as in sarcasm or satire. The managerial elite, however, violates the principle in order to trick the common people, but also to signal intent to the rest of the elite. It is why every new social fad comes with new insider jargon.
The regularized flouting of the principle of commonality in political discourse is not entirely due to deceit, even though it is often a happy accident. The managerial elite in particular, but the managerial class in general, lives in a different shared reality than the people over whom they rule. More important, the managerial class is increasingly aware of the class difference. Much of what defines the ruling class is the shared knowledge of the difference between them and the rest.
This is why political discourse is increasingly frustrating, but also pointless. The gap between how the media, for example, talks about the Trump indictments and how normal people talk about it is too large to cross. The shared reality of the media imagines Trump leading an armed rebellion against the system. The shared reality of the normal people is of a man being tormented by the ruling elite. There is no commonality here, so the communication is cognitively meaningless.
What this suggests is that the clash between the rulers and the ruled is much more than a clash of interests. It is not simply about one side wanting different ends than the other side or wanting more from the result than the other side. Those sorts of conflicts rest on a set of commonly accepted principles. This clash is due to the managerial class living in a different contextual reality from the people. The current conflict is not a clash of interests, but a clash of incompatible realities.
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It’s amazing how your brilliant political insights fit the political landscape of Israel. Making Trump and Bibi so much alike. And likable by most of our voters. Although Bibi is currently behind the helm, the balance of power – ruling class contra voters’ majority – is so much tilted that I am curious to learn whether you bode well for Israel.
It does not help that the managerial elite believe in a reality that is flatly impossible. Men cannot become women. You cannot lose three wars in 20 years and survive as a nation. You cannot wipe out the heritage stock of a nation and continue on as if James Madison just wrote his great defenses of the Constitution. They believe in things that are so ridiculously stupid that there is not only a class of beliefs, there is that crashing sound of reality smashing into the ruling elites.
Take climate change. 17 years ago, Algore made a ridiculous movie called “An Inconvenient Truth”. In it, he shows computer generated images of floodwaters inundating New York City in the year 2100. https://youtu.be/-dSG5uKzU3o
We are now 23 years into that century, literally 23% of the way there. There is absolutely ZERO water rising to threaten NYC. We were laughing about this at work today that there is nobody worried about this. Rich people still want to buy property on Martha’s Vinyard WHICH IS AN ISLAND! I joked that Plymouth Rock seems to be okay. https://www.britannica.com/place/Plymouth-Massachusetts Other than an aborted effort to move it to a city museum in the 19th Century, it is otherwise sitting there by the water with a small monument over it. 23 years ago that rock was there. 17 years ago when Algore made his fake movie, it was there. Nobody seems to be worried about having to move it.
And then there’s the cross-dressing weirdo fixation that the Ruling Class has these days…
It’s not just that there’s a difference in worldviews. It’s that one of those worldviews consists mainly of impossible fantasies that require just a small amount of critical thinking to overcome.
The FT had a laudatory review of Jan Zielonka’s “the Lost Future and How to Reclaim It” wherein the author, a Pole who longs for the Jaruzelski dictatorship explains how the nation state should be replaced with NGOs administering a borderless world to decide who lives and dies.
The argument Zielonka makes is that “our democracy” does not work because it promotes the nation-state, and that nation-state wants security and safety for its individuals instead of mass third world migration, living in the pod, eating the bugs, to save the planet! Thus NGOs must take power and ruthlessly exterminate both the people and nation state. As democracy invariably puts into power deplorables instead of the true enlightened technocrats. Like himself.
This is very interesting as it comes right up against the Russian and Maoist versions of bureaucracy, which are straight out nationalist. The justification of the CCP and Xi Xinping is Chinese Nationalism, straight and center. The same for Vladimir Putin. Organization of industrial resources for military purposes is simply incompatible with either open borders (too much money to welfare not enough for military spending along with a divided ethny unwilling to serve) or rule by NGO. There are no green tanks nor electric jets. The Ottoman Empire had no aircraft carriers.
Thus the crisis of the bureaucracy as the military-industrial complex comes right up against the green-open/borders complex. Two factions, each committed to ideology and unwilling to bend. The shock of the joint Chinese/Russian naval group passing by the Aleutians must give even the Joint Chiefs pause. As has the Spy Balloon episode, and the corrupt deals the Bidens make with the Chinese.
At a certain point some Mao or Xi or Putin will seize control of the bureaucracy and make it theirs, turning to Nationalism to dispose of their enemies inside the managerial class. Of course at no point will voting make any difference. But the shadow-play around Trump is yesterday’s news. Tomorrow’s is some General deciding he not Obama will be running Biden and his team. The threat of NGO-istan is just too great for that branch of managers.
“This year we explored the failure of democracy. How the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control, and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.”
https://youtu.be/EBxgrr0wL8M
Every baizuo bugman I know (fortunately not many) thinks the Trump indictments Speak Truth To Power and Uphold The Rule Of Law. They think by being on the “side” they are on they are Sticking It To The Man. Being part of the Resistance. Fighting Capitalism. And you’re never going to convince them otherwise, not with any amount of truth, logic, or evidence.
Trump is not a young man, someday he will be gone, and I wonder if they will then think all the world’s problems have been solved, or if they will just find a new Goldstein. But my intuition says events will overtake that process.
There is one theoretically possible scenario in which Voting Harder is justified: A Trump victory, however unlikely that is, may well compel blue states to secede. And we just wave goodbye. Problem solved. But I expect They would eliminate that threat before allowing it to get that far.
” A Trump victory, however unlikely that is, may well compel blue states to secede.”
This is why the 2020 election was rigged. The Regime realized the Right is largely cowardly and would put up with the fraud but the Left would leave the Union if Trump won. The Regime will murder Trump before it gets to the point where California, especially, bolts the Union. While the Regime surely has wargamed assassination, they may be correctly afraid that the usual rightwing timidity might not hold, either. They are in a conundrum, hence the ludicrous and totalitarian lawfare.
The grillers who voted for Biden because they just wanted the insanity to stop were somehow never able to understand that most of the insanity was coming from the left’s/admin state’s reaction to Trump, not from Trump himself.
The Left gaslights with projection as their favorite tool because they know how effective it is.
Exactly, Geese. Grillers, maybe less now but still, are empty vessels filled with leftwing gaslighting and ludicrous lies. The cost of what is thrown on the grill does have their attention, though.
I think many did understand. What they got wrong was expecting the hysterical reaction to Trump to end once he was out.
They always threaten to leave, but never do.
The managerial elites live on the artificial soil of an urban cosmopolis which they never leave. No matter where in the world they go, there are NY and DC waiting for them, and the hive-mind is always accessible via their smartphone.
Their world consists entirely in the manipulation of symbols. Everything about their life—the way they eat and consume, the way they relate, the way they think—it all takes place within this immense system of indices that we call the modern city. Any piece of reality that cannot be processed and adapted to the city symbolism is left outside and ignored. Any that is admitted is falsified until it satisfies the city’s exigencies. The result is a glittering world of pure artifice, sterile and without a future, but captivating to most people because it provides the illusion of control. The manger-types looks at the city as “his world,” and it reflects outwardly what his mind is inwardly.
Like all things, this city-world must draw in its nourishment from the Earth. It has a never-ending appetite for raw materials and for wave after wave of men which it draws in from all corners of the globe. But it wants nothing to do with these things in their natural state. They are only desired as units of economic utility to prop up the city and support the expanding hive. This lead to an implacable and irreconcilable hatred between city and country: the city imposes its false and stifling values upon the life of the country and the goods flowing up therefrom, which it sees as mere objects for its own consumption, neglecting the lives of the peasantry who are bound up with the production of these goods. What is life to one is death to the other.
The fanaticism of the manager-class flows in part from its status as an obligate predator upon the landscape, and also in part from a deep fear that the land-based values of the country will one day overcome and shatter the urban artificialities. Knowing nothing except symbol manipulation, the managers will then find themselves with no world to inhabit, and be left to wander forever like cursed spirits with no flesh. The obsessive drive to spread urban life to every individual and nation, to destroy every class distinction and sex distinction and other types of real (and therefore uncontrollable) identity, is rooted in the terror of meeting with an other type of life than that which they themselves are. They need the country, but the country doesn’t need them. This asymmetry is at the heart of all their self-importance.
The only tool that they really possess is money, i.e. the chief symbol by which all the other symbols are manipulated. However, they have pushed this too far and, in resorting to arbitrary and confiscatory piracy, have greatly lessened trust in the one place they can ill-afford to lose it. Once people have had it to the point that they are better off taking their chances outside the monetary system than in enduring the depredations of the elites as the price of participation, then there is nothing anyone can do to keep the society from falling apart. And we have almost arrived at that point.
Beautifully put.
We have to realize there are many layers to the Hive, similar to the bees from which we derive the metaphor. Most are drones, who are very important to keeping the Hive happy and protected from the Dirts outside of it. “Praetorian Guard” is a close but insufficient analogy, but I’ll still go with it.
The most important people to keep happy are the workers/Praetorian Guard and these also will be the first to experience deprivation when the Dirts no longer provide sustenance to the Hive. Initial responses to the passive resistance can be seen from the USSR in its earliest days when Reds foraged outside the city gates to steal food from the peasants. This is not the same as the Holodomor but certainly laid the groundwork for it. Back further in time, feudal lords imposed the equivalent of the jizya on the peasants. The Muslims, of course, imposed the actual jizya. And on and on.
All of the solutions require happy workers to do unspeakable acts. When they find their money worthless, they initially will keep what is stolen from the peasants, and in time will take from the Queen and her drones. We are not to the first point yet but it is on the horizon.
From your lips to God’s ears. The city is Paul Kingsnorth’s Machine, a globalizing and dehumanizing artifact. Time for the rusticated to withhold the food, ore and other products of sustenance; and instead find occasions to pour sand in the gears. Let the cities grind to a halt.
“The only tool that they really possess is money, ”
Which is kind of like saying “The only tool that they really possess is money and everything money can buy”
I don’t disagree that money is their primary asset, but as far as assets go, it’s a pretty good one to have.
The police state is extremely expensive. But they have the money to finance it. Police and military hardware is pretty expensive, but they have the money to pay for it. All of the spying they do on us is also expensive.
The worst part is, besides newly printed money, it’s your money they take from you and use against you. I’m sure the McMichaels were quite proud to be productive citizens (even if dad was a tax supported cop) who paid their taxes on time. But their money they paid to the state of Georgia was used to oppress them and throw them in prison for the rest of their lives.
I suppose the question is when King Dollar meets its demise or becomes an ordinary currency, can they continue to run the empire and police state plus the managerial state. My guess is probably not. But when this is going to happen is anyone’s guess.
I was not as clear as I should have been.
My point in the post above was to use “money” to mean specifically “those values which have already been abstracted and distorted by the city.” The sum of money and all the things that can be bought with it precisely defines the field that the city actually controls. It certainly seems very impressive, but since these are precisely the artificial values to begin with, their is something precarious about them.
A country economy based on settled trade patterns could function practically without money, simply by people trading goods of known exchange value. On the other hand, the city economy can function on nothing but money, because its only purpose is symbol manipulation. This is its only weakness.
The city dominates and colonizes the country when it forces the simple peasants and tradesmen to buy and sell at its prices, in its currency. By controlling exchange, everything else in the world becomes merely “province” in respect to the imperial city. Freeing the country from the city must necessarily involve the reverse process.
“the city imposes its false and stifling values upon the life of the country and the goods flowing up therefrom, which it sees as mere objects for its own consumption, neglecting the lives of the peasantry who are bound up with the production of these goods. What is life to one is death to the other.”
So Wells pretty much got it right in “The Time Machine” back in 1895… it’s the Eloi vs. the Morlocks, except that the Morlocks aren’t eating the Eloi.
Yet.
The only tool that they really possess is money
That’s not nothing
However, they have pushed this too far
And that’s what happens when the cow gets milked to death, for while the money is very important, it is also all they have. Oops.
Good post, Z. Another word is “protest”, as it works hand in hand with “our democracy.” Starting with Unite the Right, moving on to the pandemic shutdowns, the Floyd riots, and then Jan 6 2021, the meaning of “protest” became very clear. If you are “protesting” in favor of the elite agenda, anything you do is a valid and acceptable protest. If you are not in favor of the elite agenda, nothing you do is a valid and acceptable protest. The elites have decided what is and is not an acceptable protest and what grievances can and cannot be petitioned for redress. As it turns out, the only time you can protest is when you are doing so in support of the regime. Obviously, this is an untenable situation, but it’s also the end stage of a democracy and a multicultural empire. It cannot be held together with anything but force and violence.
Some SJW prosecutor won the election for county prosecutor for the county Charlottesville (where UTR took place) is located. Now he is sending warrants across the country to get protestors arrested and extradited back to Virginia to face the trumped up charges. It’s all felonies. Virginia doesn’t have a statute of limitations for felonies. Assuming they get bail and can make the bail, they have to travel back and forth to show up for the hearings and pay for a lawyer in Virginia. I don’t know what the bail rules are in VA, but where I live, you lose 30% of your bail win or lose. Even if the prosecutor just drops the charges, you still lose 30% of your bail money as a processing fee.
So now they are reaching back in time to get the bad-thinkers.
Eventually, this kind of thing will be countered by refusals of Red states to extradite people for bogus warrants like this or law enforcement to simply refuse to serve the warrants. That will be another big step towards de facto partition of the country.
It would be an interesting irony that shitlib-originated warrants would be possibly ignored or actively opposed, given that the same sort of people were doing the ignoring or actively opposing warrants from slave states seeking the return of runaway slaves, contending that these warrants needed to be resisted as they served the purposes of people with an evil agenda.
So, turnabout would seem to be fair play on that logic. Their warrants are the moral equivalent of an enforcement vehicle for a latter day incarnation of the Fugitive Slave Act that their forebears would not permit to influence them to cooperate. Would there be violence if they sent bounty hunters after resisters?
When two groups of people inhabit the same space yet exist within “different realities,” the issue is ALWAYS resolved by violence, in which one side imposes its reality on the other.
Now, I am not suggesting that WE engage in violence — not only for the pragmatic acknowledgement of the fed trolls and the AI fedbots that scan every single online post in the country and store it in the Utah NSA facility, but because I do not think that it would actually be successful at this point in time.
However, we must recognize that THEY are perfectly willing to engage in violence to impose their reality on us, and we have seen this repeatedly in the past few years, from the George Floyd riots to Antifa, to the total impunity with which black criminals are allowed to operate in leftist cities, to the troops in the streets of D.C. in 2021, to the COVID lockdowns and mandates, to the 75 felony counts against Donald Trump, every single one of which is backed by armed men with handcuffs and the keys to prison, to the arrest of his attorney, his political adviser, his Chief of Staff, and his NSA adviser.
Since they have gotten away with all of it, it is reasonable to expect that they have become emboldened and are willing to do much, much more.
That is the issue of today. I have no easy solutions to the problem that I can offer at this point in time.
Yes, we would be utterly annihilated in a violent confrontation. One side has all of the organizational power and can control access to things like weapons and ammunition and communications and the other side has some small arms and ammunition stored in small amounts in millions of separate locations.
If there was even a small chance violence would help our side, it would require, at minimum, good leadership and large scale secure coordination. But we simply do not have this and are unlikely to get it any time soon. A group of individuals working possibly at cross purposes will always lose to a well disciplined team. A lot of our people believe that because the visible forces who oppose us are often weirdos and malcontents acting out in public, that this is the force we face.
In reality, the force we face is the police state. More than 100% of the force who tries to organize at this stage in the game will end up in jail or dead long before their first battle. Every time you pick up a phone or write a (postal) letter or send an email or text, who you contacted is recorded. This is really useful once they decide you are a suspect. Because that’s when they start unwinding the conspiracy with all the helpful data they’ve collected.
Tars: Here is a chilling example of different iterations of that police state. Homeless/druggies/Antifa who are funded, supported, defended, and promoted by the police state. This is why crime has been redefined out of existence, and why your very existence has been turned into a crime. The elites and the ‘homeless’ are on the same team, and YOU (working, middle class, White, Christian, etc.) are the enemy.
Author appears to be a conservacuck civnat, but if this account and photos are not staged, it ought to make everyone stop and think. I’ve read others who’ve noticed the increasing training and coordination behind Antifa. We know who funds them. We truly are up against an unholy coalition. The only rational response at present is strategic retreat and patience.
https://truthonthestreets.substack.com/p/organized-crime-and-the-homeless
I think the right would utterly destroy the antifa/BLM crew of misfits, looters and weirdos. Antifa is only scary insofar as they are fully backed by the state, at least when they face us.
Remember bike-lock guy? Probation for a totally unprovoked attempted murder. (any “reasonable” person understands that smashing someone in the head with a hunk of steel is likely to cause serious bodily injury and or death). Or when the proud boys were in NYC, and Antifa broke the GOP clubhouse’s windows and then jumped the PBs as they tried to leave. The Proud Boys kicked their butts. They’re sitting in prison right now. Or how an Army sergeant in Texas was just convicted (and sentenced to 25 years in prison) of shooting an antifa weirdo who had an AK pointed at him.
A new prosecutor down in Charlottesville, VA is hunting down and indicting UTR protestors (who were attacked by antifa) for fighting back 6 years ago! The long arm of the law indeed.
Man for man, antifa and BLM would not have a chance against the right. But you can’t fight Antifa/BLM because if you so much as defend yourself when they attack you completely unprovoked, you will get thrown in prison.
The whole police state is weaponized. The law is weaponized. The forces of chaos are exempt from the law while we are subject to every jot and tittle of the law and then some. The consequence free “discretion” allowed for police and prosecutors easily turns the law into a tool of oppression.
Dropping a letter with no return address in a public mailbox, I’m not sure they have a reliable way of knowing who the sender is. Yet. But it’s theoretically possible that they could, between facial recognition tech and a letter scanner working in concert.
A couple of months ago they removed the outdoor drive up mailboxes from my local post office. Hmmm
Every single piece of mail is photographed. Presumably OCR is run on these photos which would create a nice file documenting who sent letters to whom. They seem to be able to catch people who send questionable stuff through the mail even though they took countermeasures like dropping it in a mailbox away from people and using the delivery address as the return address. I think the “MAGA Bomber” took countermeasures and he was caught.
The post office employs document experts who can reveal other stuff on the documents be it the envelope or the paper inside. For example, if you write something down on a notepad, what you write will be visible 5 (or more) pages down (though each additional page becomes harder to find it) through the pressure you applied to the pen or pencil. Cops have been doing that a long time, but the post office has equipment and techniques that can detect it much further down. I saw or read a story where the document specialists from the PO assisted the cops to retrieve such prior writing further into the notebook. IIRC, it turned out it was 8 pages.
Some lawyer was just caught submitting phony records to the courts. It was caught via the font used. The font didn’t exist at the time the document was supposedly generated.
Point is, they have a lot of tools available to them. Some of those tools are secrets. You really can’t take countermeasures if you don’t know what the vulnerability is.
Always use Times New Roman.
I’m not afraid of men whose only hand calluses are from holding a selfie stick or a golf club. The bartender with a broken nose and scars from repeated thumpings would be more fearsome. Wammen, however, now there’s another story. They don’t fight fair.
Even identifying the enemy can be a problem. The last time the press actually opposed a government policy, warrantless surveillance, the Washington Post did a series in which they mapped sites of unmarked office buildings scattered throughout the United States where those potentially thus engaged work. Most ‘revolutionaries’ seem to believe if they take out DMV lady and other public-facing employees, they are striking a fatal blow against the state.
Which brings us to the next problem. How bothered do you think our rulers would be if such ‘visible’ targets, along with a mess of Antifa types and the security forces who protect them, were taken out in an armed uprising? Or might they use them to absorb all the lead in the ammunition closets of the would be revolutionaries, rendering everyone else defenseless? Even the American Revolutionaries had allies who kept them resupplied, and faced a government with a small army that had to rely on mercenaries.
We need to learn from others who are as culturally beleaguered as we are becoming: Orania as a self-made small town for Afrikaner cultural preservation, the fortified homes in Johannesburg functioning as surreptitious businesses employing Afrikaners, the Mennonite colonies of Canada growing food and operating small industries to employ their German-speaking residents, and even homesteaders on small farms throughout the U.S. forming networks for greater self-reliance and support.
This is a very long one but absolutely comprehensive, and relevant to today’s essay.
But if you’re not a fan of Zman’s brevity then I highly recommend it.
That article does a good job of explaining why the managerial regime pushes Woke even when seemingly in conflict, such as megacorps promoting marxist class warfare. Mainly that Wokeism exists in a constant state of crisis (like Jehovah’s witnesses predicting the rapture every decade), and that constant state of crisis always necessitates mommy government and daddy oligarchy to step in and kiss the boo boos and make them feel all better.
Ok, time to speculate!
Thought from the morning commute: Marx essentially said the bourgeoisie were the problem, but that they also had to be the solution— some faction of them had to lead a proletarian revolution against the others.
The problem cannot be the solution, but that’s the thrust of leftist thought since at least Marx. That’s why I think they have the premises right but manage to mangle the conclusions. DR3, self-loathing, etc. Marx probably being the most famous example today, with his torurous prose and tortured logic. He was trying to square the circle.
So, for the speculative part: who are the bourgeoisie? Urban professionals, academics, merchants— new money. NOT aristocrats. Why did they rise? Perhaps because of a crisis of the late Middle Ages, specifically the failure of faith to solve that time’s problems.
What does that have to do with aristocrats? The word means ‘the best’, as I understand it. What makes them the best? Their nobility— they are the representatives of their people and the general will, par excellence. It’s a God-given quality, so to speak.
So you have a bunch of people (the bourgeois managerial elite), by turns idealistic and materialistic, but lacking that third quality of the people they replaced (which makes them foreign to the proles), trying to do those people’s traditional job. It’s a fine recipe for what we’ve got.
Here is the $64,000 question:
How much time do we have left?
Nukes, economics, gulags, civil war?
How much time do we have left.
Somebody once said, any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the waiting, the day to day living that wears you down. How much ammo, spam, and bourbon do I need?
WCiv911: No way to know. I used to worry about the same myself. But considering all the logistics and timing and guessing became debilitating and ultimately seemed futile. So we cut out all those concerns and just relocated. Problem solved. We couldn’t have done anything better for our happiness and security.
Many of us here at Zman talk about “normalcy bias.” Most people don’t see just how degraded and dangerous their situation is because the decay has been gradual (boiling the frog) and most people are – to be blunt – fairly stupid. Well, my husband is traveling for work, and his very long drive yesterday (about 745 miles) took him through what most would consider ‘red’ states and areas. Granted he was on the highway and only stopped to use the bathroom or get some food, but the majority of people he saw were han, pajeet, somalians, and various mussulmen. The noticing was particularly stark because we’ve moved to a remnant of heritage America that is 90+% White. ‘Murrica f*k yeah folks and suburbanites just don’t see how bad it is and remain convinced their immediate homes/areas remain ‘safe.’
They are wrong. Either make some major changes in your life, or accept your eventual demise and just relax and forget all your concerns. Most people focus on the quotidian and don’t see the major trends or understand their speed and trajectory. It really is that black and white. It really is that dire.
Thanks 3g, for that good sensible advice.
Instead of just watchful waiting, we have taken some action. We recently bought a bugout place, 7 acres with a pond, wildlife, fishing. I would hate to abandon our nice home in suburbia but at least we have that option. That frog. Increasing crime, vibrancy, taxes, radio active blast circumference – timing will be critical. Bugout too early better than too late.
We have to change the bugout mentality. We’ve got from there to here without anyone bugging out. We are likely to get from here to a much worse there also without any bugging out.
Bugout preparedness is based on an incident/event based outlook. But I doubt this is how the SHTF happens. Just day after day of small changes adding up and compounding over time. One day it was “morning in America” and then one day we woke up and had trannies and homos singing we are after your children.
Tars: Not ‘bugout,’ but strategic relocation. Not direct confrontation, but ‘x’ generation warfare. Not us, but our children and grandchildren.
Don’t accept the other side’s frame and stereotype.
Flight or fight?
Sing in Kenny!
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
You never count your money
When you’re sittin’ at the table
There’ll be time enough for countin’
When the dealin’s done
Every gambler knows
That the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away
And knowin’ what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner
And every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die
in your sleep.
“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.”
People who ask how much time we have left are missing the forest for the trees. Look around you. The collapse is here, it is just not evenly distributed.
The Rust Belt is hollowed out with huge swathes of the midwest looking like something out of a post apocalyptic movie. Our nations inner cities are practically “no go” zones. Crime is through the roof and is pretty much allowed, if not outright encouraged. Corruption is totally out in the open and no one seems to care all that much. Etc.
Crisis after crisis we continue to fall down that long staircase. The question should not be “when do we finally fall down the staircase” as we are falling down it now. The question should be when do we finally hit the bottom of the staircase and what will that look like?
“How much longer does the fake money retain value” is the big question as to when. Most everything else necessary for collapse has already happened. The currency is the linchpin. As we have seen, things can keep on existing in their dysfunctional state just fine, as long as the money works.
“How much longer does the fake money retain value”
Until the world starts shitting BRICS.
“This gets to why America is in such an agitated state, despite the relative peace and prosperity of the age. The people in charge seem like they are not just speaking a different language but doing so from a different reality. That is because for the most part, they are using a different language and they do operate in a different world from the bulk of the people. The managerial class is defined by the managerial elite and therefore operates by a different cooperative principle.”
There’s some truth to this but there’s also the fact that to the extent they inhabit the same reality as us, Grice’s maxoms don’t apply. Specifically the ruling elite is out to obscure and obfuscate what is going on. Thus the proxy war in Ukraine ignited and sustained by the USA and it’s European vassals is to “protect the sovereignty of Ukraine against a demented Russian aggressor.” There’s “low inflation” and a “full-throttled economic recovery” in place. Virtually everything coming out from the ruling elite is unalloyed garbage. Usually the diametric opposite is close to the truth. The ruling elite is malevolent and disingenuous.
“To the managerial elite, democracy means the process by which the majority or an assumed majority is convinced to support elite opinion. This is why they are inspired to redouble their efforts whenever they lose at the ballot box. Democracy requires them to work harder to get their desired result. Expediency may require them to go around this process using the courts or administrative fiat.”
The work-around these days is to rig the election results. This is why half the country is in incendiary mood — it knows it’s being lied to, short-changed, and shafted. In the halcyon days of old, the ruling elite would throw a few crumbs to the proles, and try to “manufacture consensus.” Now they’re just ruling by outright fraud, backed by massive surveillance and a crooked administrative and judicial state. Just look at the way Trump is being hounded.
“maxims’, not ‘maxoms.” No way of editing typos.
That post was your magnom opus…
Great, except that the other half of the country thinks that open treason is cool, like this latest episode:
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/biden-energy-secretary-secretly-consulted-top-chinese-energy-official-spr-release-sales
“ Now they’re just ruling by outright fraud, backed by massive surveillance and a crooked administrative and judicial state.”
Soon they will drop the fraud facade and simply rule by force. Pure force. Here in AZ, one major State office—Attorney General—is still being contested. Basic point of case is that 9K votes were found that had not been counted in a rural County. The number of votes separating the candidates—290. Judge tossed the case out.
OK, so you’ll appeal to a higher court right? That’s the “process”, right? Well no. Seems that the judge has refused to “sign off” on his ruling. Without such, it can’t be appealed—because it is not official. The case can’t leave the County, nor the judge. It’s in “Limbo”. Pure malfeasance, no pretenses made as to process.
Months roll by while the newly appointed Dem Attorney General becomes more and more entrenched in the office and does more damage to the rule of law within this State.
Compsci: I know you know, but there truly is no “rule of law” for the average White man. Just accept that you are living in a full-fledged anarcho-tyranny surveillance state and act accordingly.
I do, but I’m not really writing for this group. I tend to word what I say for others as this is how I talk to others if the conversation unfolds that way. Practice makes perfect so to speak.
The salient aspect of my missive was to give this group a bit of an update as in an “anecdote” and perhaps an insight as to how “CivNat’s” in AZ are faring in their delusional state regarding 2020 election results—which another AZ poster had discussed *positively* shortly after the AZ election results were challenged and to which I pointed out (predicted) no relief would be forthcoming from his savior, the Court system.
I enjoyed Tars and his update wrt law fare in Virginia under an out-of-control Prosecutor as I had no idea they’d gone so out of control.
He should move for a writ of mandamus from the Appellate or Supreme courts….If that’s denied, the fix is in for good…
As Solzhenitsyn said, “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
That alternative reality is on full display with this column from David Brooks where he does his best to get into the minds of dirt people. Brooks is obviously hearing Cossacks riding toward him in the distant hills and is telling his cousins that they probably should lay off the peasants before it’s too late.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/02/what-if-were-the-bad-guys-here/
But what’s most interesting is this rebuttal from Brooks’ fellow tribe and class member Zach Beauchamp, who argues that the managerial class (and their bosses) shouldn’t even try to get into the minds of these ignorant bigots.
Ironically, Beauchamp is likely more aware of the source of the dirt people’s anger than Brooks, who mostly lays it at the feet of economic difficulties and that Trump supporters are poor, lower educated people. Beauchamp rightly points out that it’s about culture and whites’ feeling of losing their country.
Naturally, Beauchamp believes that whites’ concerns are based on they’re being irredeemable racists, so the managerial class shouldn’t even try to understand them. Gentile whites are evil. End of story.
Beauchamp rightly concludes that his side and our side simply can’t live together, and he’s right. And while he doesn’t say it, you can bet that Beauchamp understands that one side needs to be defeated.
Personally, I’d like to see separation, but for people like Beauchamp, that’s not an option. We’re evil and thus can’t be left to survive. Here’s how he ends the piece.
“The question is not how David Brooks and his friends feel about Trump’s base, but whether what they believe about them is true.
To figure out how to get the country past its current impasse, we need to look at reality as it is, not as we imagine it might be. And the reality is that our deep political divide is rooted, first and foremost, in profound and largely irreconcilable views of who America is for and what its social hierarchy should look like. That may be unpleasant for Brooks — and all of us — to contemplate, but reality’s ugliness doesn’t provide an excuse for ignoring it.”
https://www.vox.com/2023/8/4/23818817/trump-support-david-brooks-economic-anxiety
The Brooks article is interesting, but these “we-elites-need-to-get-our act-together,” pieces are always as self-flattering as they are handwringing. Brooks isn’t an out-of-touch elite; he’s a credentialed moron. Having a high-school dropout pick economic policies out of a top hat and spinning a Rand McNally globe to select our next pointless war-of-choice couldn’t have produced much worse results than what we got from the best and brightest the last few decades. The maxim of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations (sometimes two) obviously doesn’t apply to the tribe. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were not dumb, or personally weak. They were of that same generation as Norman Mailer, Jews who actually did things like box or play contact sports as young men and actually went to war, whose fathers—if not in the trades—at least ran small business like notion stores or tailoring shops. Their pudgy kids are wretched manbabies. There’s some sort of winnowing process—a ritual young men are supposed to undergo—that these guys skipped in their youth, and it’s left them deformed children. A seventy year-old baby is not a pretty sight.
Brooks has always fancied himself as being more aware of the concerns of the dirt people and has (sort of) advocated that his people should show more noblesse oblige, if only out of self-preservation.
But, in truth, Brooks can’t understand us, because he’s not one of us, either blood or background. Brooks also doesn’t seem to understand his own people. They can’t show more noblesse oblige because it’s not in their nature.
They are are middle-man merchant people that due to the unusual circumstances of the 20th century have found themselves in charge.
I agree that the current crop of the tribe are lessor men than their grandparents, but even those better men would have had a hard time running a people that they don’t understand with the mental tools of a middle man.
Beauchamp is calling for a crusade, no doubt to be fought by compliant Gentiles against BadWhites. People like him want war now.
Beauchamp correctly understands that whites showing any pride in themselves, their people or their culture/past means game over for his vision of America – and the world.
Trump is causing whites to question the regime’s morality and that incredibly dangerous to them. Beauchamp understands that this has to be stopped now and stopped hard.
Even turning whites into a minority isn’t enough if whites begin to view themselves as a people worth protecting and promoting. We have to be either physically or mentally destroyed for Beauchamp’s world to exist.
“ Trump is causing whites to question the regime’s morality…”
Causing? Or focusing? Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but I’m sensing the latter. We were mad before Trump, but had no (true) champion. Same repeat of 2016 occurring today. DeSantis sings sweet words, but gains no traction. Trump is rude and crude—and now being persecuted as proof of his bona fides as one of the people. (True or not is irrelevant, perception is everything.)
But now DeSantis has shown his true colors as a member of the Cabal, so that act is over…DeSantis and/or his campaign managers must be seriously dumb, blowing off the normies who initially bought his act….
DeSantis really is the worst campaigner. What a moron. He could have ignored the question or given a noncommittal answer like:
“Well, I haven’t looked into personally, so I can’t say one way or the other, but there were certainly a lot of questionable things going on during the vote counting and we should look into making all elections fair.”
Instead, he enrages half of the GOP voters and does nothing to gain favor with the rest.
The guy deserves to be getting his ass kicked.
I predict DeSantis hangs in there waiting for someone or some legal event to remove Trump from electoral contention. He can then pick up the “bloody shirt” and forge his way into the Presidency. Works in the movies.
Every now and then David Brooks reminds us, and himself, that he used to be a conservative. Well, an oughts- era neocon, at any rate. Anybody else remember his “Bobos”- bohemian bourgeoisie? Very prescient cultural description of the then- incipient managerial class.
Although he performed the ritual Trump denunciations, he’ll be lucky if this column doesn’t get him cancelled. The one thing the current year left cannot tolerate is doubt about its moral purpose, and the concomitant degeneracy of its opposition. No leftist has bothered to examine his premises at least since 2012, or more likely 1998.
Ironically, Brooks doesn’t care about the dirt people. He cares about his people and his class. He understands that the one peasant group with the ability to overthrow the system is getting restless.
Brooks just wants his people and his class to stay in power. Unfortunately, for him, they are on a religious crusade. It’s no longer just about the money; it’s a battle between good and evil.
For the tribe, it’s all about the Holycaust story. Once they accepted that as gospel, everything changed. It was now a caged death match between them and gentile Europeans. For liberal whites, it’s all about Puritan morality and getting rid of the non-believers.
But the Hollyhoax narrative is really wearing thin, since their minority pets couldn’t care less about the six gazillion jews…..
Quite true, but it remains the central story to being a modern Jew. In their minds, no other group – Asians, Hispanics, blacks, whoever – is in the ballpark of a threat as whites.
Never again means getting rid of yours truly – or, at least, making us powerless.
Exactly. I wouldn’t endorse any of David Brooks’ political opinions, but I have always found him to be an astonishingly accurate chronicler of social trends, perhaps more accurate than anyone else I could name. One ignores David Brooks at one’s own peril.
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on.
You and your ilk can have those places, sire.
Especially San Fran. Watch where you step!!!
What first jumps out at me from the Beauchamp article is the strong implication that non-historic Americans should largely have the privilege of defining America.
My aggregate impression from both the Brooks and Beauchamp columns is that it’s time to buy stock in guillotines.
Citizen: As I read Zman’s post I immediately thought of Brooks’ column, which I had read in summary via John Derbyshire at Unz due to NYT paywall. So obviously I agree with you. I had not seen Beauchamp’s post, because I don’t read Vox. But while you correctly characterize Beauchamp’s rebuttal as “F** those rayciss, homophibic White bigots,” I think you charitably mischaracterize Brooks’ excuse for why Whites support Trump. Yes, he’s hearing imaginary Cossacks, but he’s also justifying his elite status and beliefs. He notes that he still trusts the legal system, Trump is a monster, and the managerial class is “earnest, kind, and public spirited.”
The only flaw Brooks is willing to admit to is . . . being smarter than the average bear. Of course “”his”” people continued to get married while advocating single parenthood – precisely because they are “earnest, kind and public spirited.” Brooks’ rhetorical device of questioning his status and motives is merely a means to justify and applaud his beliefs and actions. He’s not truly trying to understand how the average kulak feels, of course. While he’ll depict the underclass as gap-toothed White redneck trailer trash, those he’s really concerned about are the blacks and browns who’ve perhaps been economically harmed by not being smart enough (i.e. juice) to benefit from elite policies.
As for those benighted White bigots, Brooks believes they need to be thrown some economic crumbs and they’ll settle back down. There’s no need to address their moral and cultural concerns because the beliefs and concerns of average wypipo are beneath contempt and not up for debate – as Zman notes with his example of slavery, what the elites view as ‘immoral’ need not even be discussed. All the right people know what to think and believe and profess. But the little people are getting a bit restive, so they need to be pacified just a bit until they are fully mixed and erased from the elites’ “moral” arc of history.
Oh, Brooks has no love for us. He’s just the most aware of the least self-aware people on the planet, and he can feel that natives are getting restless so he’s trying to figure out why.
He can’t understand us, but he’s at least thinking about us. We’re still stupid redneck bigots in his mind, but he realizes that it’s not a bad idea to try to get a feel for what motivates your enemy.
“Oh, Brooks has no love for us. He’s just the most aware of the least self-aware people on the planet”
Poetry, sir, and spot on.
Citizen of a Silly Country: “…fellow tribe and class member Zach Beauchamp…”
So what is Beauchamp’s real name?
Bacharach? Bachmann? Barach? Barsky? Beckman? Benjamin? Berkowitz? Berlinsky? Bernheim? Bernstein?
Because it sure as heck ain’t “Beauchamp”.
Bourbon: Methinks his papa took a page from Ashley Montague (((Israel Ehrenberg))).
Every Single Time
https://factsbuddy.com/zack-beauchamp/
Some day….maybe, there will be an example where Every Single Time doesn’t apply. It just hasn’t happened yet.
He mentioned having Christian paternal grandparents so that’s where his surname came from.
I’ve never heard of a tribesperson, at least in America, changing their name to something French.
I read Brooks’ column this weekend. I remembered a book by Thomas Frank (the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” guy) named “Listen, Liberals!” I read before the 2016 election. I don’t think this book was very popular but it was succint and pierced through the problem with Democrat Party liberalism beautifully. Thomas Frank discussed how the party had become totally disconnected from its historical base as it became a tool for the oligarchs, and was in danger of losing that base. A prediction that was borne out absolutely and completely that November.
The point is, none of these critiques are new. Indeed, after the 2016 election, a few people mentioned that book as a reason why HRC lost and how the party should refocus. But they did not. They immediately pivoted to “muh russia” and “muh bigots” and doubled down. That is where Beauchamp’s response came from. It’s completely nonsensical and of course links to plenty of “studies” that were surely undertaken to invent the chosen Dem narrative. If you do an early life check on Beauchamp, you probably won’t be surprised at the result.
It is interesting the Beauoski feels the need to cite a bunch of ridiculous studies. Just backs up Z’s point that these people are writing to convince themselves of things, not others.
Those “studies” show scientifically that whites are evil, ignorant racists/bigots. It’s science, dammit!
I suspect the “scholars” have invested very little time and effort in determining the prevalence of racism among nuggras and Finkels. Or Leftists, for the matter of it. And that’s because the “scholars” have redefined racism so that it applies only to the Blue-eyed Ice Devils.
It dovetails into this: what – say Trump/et al wins in 2024 & the Dems refuse to let them be seated, I.e. refuse to leave? What would happen then? Kirk Schlichter is down on Trump but he makes some very alarming points here: https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/08/07/monday-n2626688
I can see it happening; “Trump/all Republicans are Hitler! We’ll lose our democracy!” And where would the pushback come from? Certainly not the egghead Pentagon class who know they’d be fired the minute Trump/et al walked into the WH + the media would be all in on it & any demonstrations would be labeled as “white supremacy” & put down with an iron boot a’la Jan 6. Every Dem would be in on this. We know they want permanent power.
We would have never thought a sitting POTUS would have been bogusly impeached 3x nor had an innocent woman blown away by a Capitol Police officer with zero repercussions.
Hope I’m wrong & in tinfoil hat Land. Convince me.
I loathe the cuck Schlichter and think voting is a fool’s errand but he spot on here. His observation that riots will break out and be sponsored by the Regime even more overtly is the reality. I’m desperately trying to drop in a water well pump with less reliance on the generator in anticipation of propane interruptions.
Jack – when you figure out the well pump, let me know. Everything I’ve read tells me our well is too deep for any of the hand pumps or solar pumps to work. That’s why we hope to buy and bury very large potable water holding tanks between the well and the house, which could be easily accessed by an inexpensive pump because they’re only just below the frost line. And in the meantime, we are also still considering spending yet more thousands on a second 1000 gallon propane tank (yes, even that will run out eventually but 2000 gallons will last a good while if used very carefully and conservatively).
I will. I’m looking at a pump that uses batteries that constantly store electricity and act much like the generator, only working as needed, which would be fine until the propane runs out.
I’ve also considered a second 1,000 gallon propane tank. We do have to accept that even the generator is a stopgap measure, which is why we are looking at a different well pump.
Will let you know what I find.
What’s the depth you’re looking at [Jack Dodson & 3g4me]?
Jack: Greatly appreciated.
200, Bourbon. Any suggestions appreciated.
Bourbon: I have to double check. Spoke with a guy (since retired) whose company put in the well 29 years ago and I recall him saying 460 ft or so. Need to check with my neighbor (son of guy who built this place) – he should know.
Jack Dobson: At 200 feet, you should have no problem with stainless steel pushrods.
https://tinyurl.com/mujtb6r8
==========
3g4me: 460 feet is gonna be tough.
Fiberglass pushrods [to lighten the total weight of the column] will get you down to about 325 feet.
https://tinyurl.com/yvp2hucc
==========
All other things being equal, I would definitely opt for stainless over fiberglass.
Will repeat tomorrow:
Get aboveground water tanks, keep refiiled as storage;
Gravity feed with a petcock or faucet outlet, for buckets etc. Not running water, but 2500 to 5000 gallons each.
Tanks are cheap- $900 or so, all you need is pvc / metal pipe for outlet.
I have a 2500 gal.with cheap pressurizer (shallow well) pump for running water, piped in thru front yard hose faucet (with a hose!); peach farmers in the mountains use 5000 gal tanks for their households.
Schlichter is so deluded he should be confined.
Last time Trump won, the military occupied and fortified DC *against us*, an inauguration with no audience was staged, and the celebration ended with a Riefenstahl-evoking night rally on a horror-movie set.
All this was on TV.
We are far past anything any conservative can understand—or even *observe*.
This is true and something I omitted in my response to Boarwild. Everything Schlichter says he fears has been ongoing since ’15. The Trump election results never well accepted and the Regime’s failed coup attempt–a literal one–went unpunished. The upside to the legal persecution of Trump is that it shows the judges also are The Help and at least as big whores as the politicians. That an ignorant, low IQ affirmative action sheboon is the presiding judge is especially delicious. No doubt conservatards will continue to claim the courts are a firewall but that will ring just as hollow as vote harder.
Nothing would please me more than such an scenario as described. For years now, this group comes round to the same old conclusion (albeit somewhat vaguely expressed)—nothing will fundamentally change from within the system. Change at the scale we need will only come about through a massive situational stand-off as described. In other words a demonstrable failure of our long dead Constitution to hold the country together through the long dead “rule of law”.
If you believe in the DR, then you must welcome any crisis that wakes up “Joe Normie” and brings to light the facade we live behind.
Boarwild: Schlicter is a decent guy, but he’s a civnat at heart. His ‘solution’ to the scenario he imagines is . . . Vote Harder. And meanwhile stock ammo because . . . well, just because. He won’t actually advocate using said ammo because, as he loftily informs us, we’re a ‘republic.’
Kurt’s plan: vote, work the system, arm yourself.
“So, here’s what we do collectively and individually. We vote for who we want regardless of express and implied Democrat threats. To hell with them. We fortify our elections where we have power and prepare for lawfare all the way up to the Supreme Court where we don’t. We make the case for whoever the candidate we nominate and seek to win the vote well beyond the margin of fraud – if we demonstrate overwhelming support for change, that makes a Hail Satan play like the one described above less likely. And we buy guns and ammunition, because the best deterrent to tyrannical aspirations is an armed citizenry capable of resisting dictatorship.”
I bet that if he got his way, he would just recreate our current situation, because he can’t exclude anyone who claims to believe in freedom and individuality.
We’re a republic? Not since Lincoln we’re not. And Eisenhower made that point again in Arkansas using the U.S. Army reliving its glorious past from Reconstruction.
I like to compare the reality of the ruling elite to the reality of sexual perverts. No matter how I try, I cannot wrap my head around the primitive drive of an individual who sees children as objects of lust, and who cares nothing about the psychic damage inflicted. Nor can I fully understand the primitive lust for power of wealthy elites who care nothing for the people over whom they rule, and wish to gratify their lust with the destruction of innocent populations. As far as I’m concerned, I want them dead.
Sometimes it looks like the reality of the two groups you mention is shared as there is evidence that there is a lot of overlap.
That is why the comparison works.
I like to think that I am a fairly cynical fellow, and living in universititty towns my entire life, I was certainly well aware of the presence of perverts in the communititty.
But the speed & the force & the power & the unanimity with which the paedophiles have suddenly seized control in our society is quite impressive to behold.
There must have been myriad of these perverts lurking in the shadows all these centuries.
Waiting patiently for their day in the sun.
A vast satanic army of them.
Just biding their time, laying the groundwork, winning one small battle at a time, over and over and over again…
“I want them dead”
Yep. Because let’s not forget, that they want us dead, or at the minimum, enslaved to their nefarious ends. They won’t ever stop until they succeed. Any minor setback is just that, and their focus remains crystal clear. They will never leave us alone.
> To the managerial elite, democracy means the process by which the majority or an assumed majority is convinced to support elite opinion.
The disconnect is necessary for their rule, as the minute both classes used the same language, the game is up and the masses realize they are living in an authoritarian society with extra steps.
With the current system, the elites get better compliance from a population that believes the lies of the regime and voluntarily goes along with them, which necessitates fewer resources for physical enforcement. The tradeoff is the massive propaganda apparatus and filtering mechanisms required to elevate the right people to power and propagandize the public.
When the propaganda breaks down, the fallback is more harsh enforcement, but with the added crutch of maintaining the costly institutions enforcing the narrative. For now, they are relying mostly on low-level criminals terrorizing the public to compliance so they can pretend their hands are clean, but the dumb criminal underclass is fickle, and can turn in a heartbeat.
Chet Rollins: “the majority… is CONVINCED to support elite opinion.”
This is where Heritage Amurrikkkuh let down its guard and allowed the fox [no pun intended] to sneak into the hen house.
It was a dark day in Amurrkkkun history when the Quaker meta-traitor, Henry Alloway, engineered the sale of the New York Times to Adolph Ochs, but a few decades later, when David Sarnoff was allowed to destroy Philo Farnsworth, the die was cast for the CONVINCING.
And it’s the convincing – the relentless ceaseless never-ending 24×7 flood of psychological warfare campaigns emanating from any and every possible medium of communication which has ruined the minds of the ruinable in this former nation.
Apparently we deplorables are a little moar difficult to ruin [at least psychologically], but unless & until we begin mastering human psychology, we deplorables don’t stand a chance of winning this war.
Psychology, psychology, psychology.
It’s all just psychology.
Win their hearts, win their minds.
It really is that simple.
Bourbon: Kudos for remembering and mentioning Philo Farnsworth. I read a book about him some years back (cannot recall title and author). What happened was despicable, and predictable. One of many reasons I despise and avoid television.
This is explained very well and seems completely true. A question, though: has there ever been one single case in modern liberal “democracy” where elections results caused a change in the policy preferences of the managerial class? I cannot think of one. In fact, the managerial class has frequently resorted to outright violence to create the illusion of consensus when its preferences are not ratified electorally. The civil rights protests and the anti-white racial riots of 2020 are good examples are illustrations of such kinetic action since both were staged productions for the rulers.
You have put your finger on the reason the social compact no longer can be salvaged. As grim as it looks and actually is, the numbers do not favor the managerial class over the long run. We are one major economic downturn away from a great unraveling accompanying the great sorting.
>A question, though: has there ever been one single case in modern liberal “democracy” where elections results caused a change in the policy preferences of the managerial class?
While every study should be taken with a grain of salt, the basic answer is no:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
The interesting part is at the time (2014), there was actually a good correlation between what average citizens wanted and the economic elites. I doubt that’s true anymore.
Thank you. Outside of some confused jargon, that Cambridge study seems true. I particularly like this understated line:
“our evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited”
No joke.
I think the period from the Carter election to the Reagan election was one where the schism in the ruling class was largely decided by the election results. Popular support for reform gave the reformers the moral authority to push through their program. It was a limited program and major reform was scrapped as part of the final compromise. I think if Reagan had lost in 1980, reform may not have happened at all. That said, it was clear that a significant portion of the ruling elite wanted reform.
The 2016 election is the only election where the elites got a result they universally despised. Trump is the Gracchi brothers and will meet the same end, because he won the election, not because he advocated for reform. If he had contented himself with being a gadfly, supporting reformers in the system, he would be fine. His election threatened elite control of the process and that is why they view him as a threat to democracy.
Reagan’s election was due more to disgust with Carter than any public demand for a major policy change, though. The elite schismatics who wanted to implement their preferred policies simply capitalized on Carter’s unpopularity and Reagan’s win to implement their programs. The current situation is that there is universal elite consensus about policy so elections do not matter.
Again, it is difficult to put a finger on any policy that was preferred by the elites that was upended due to an election. I would entertain Jackson’s dissolution of the Second National Bank as a possible candidate, for example, but although it seems unlikely there very well may have been elites who wanted it done.
As you point out, the present polarization of elite consensus from public preferences is without precedent. The indictments and arrests of Trump do not bode well for elite support in the near future. There is an element of irrationality and madness to it.
True, they got an election result they truly despised, but policy did not change drastically, and what little did change was quickly “corrected.”
Carter was seen as feckless on the economy and the rising Soviet challenge, especially after the Dec. 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan was seen, even by the elites, as revamping the economy and the military to play what turned out to be the Soviet endgame.
And: Z, this was one of your best.
We would have been better off with Carter in 1980 in the long run. Ronald was the first president to say that deficits don’t matter and he cut taxes because of the Laffer curve and reasons. Even in 79 the USSR was a paper tiger that in reality posed little threat but was good for the MIC. They were soundly routed in Afghanistan after a 10 year war. The CIA was either incompetent or it had it’s own interests in perpetuating the Russian bear myth. The collapse in 1991 brought all those truths out. The USSR was a hollow state.
But part of what broke them was trying to maintain parity with the US.
thezman: “[Trump’s] election threatened elite control of the process and that is why they view him as a threat to democracy.”
With the understanding that ‘democracy’ ackshually means ‘elitist tyranny’.
“ His election threatened elite control of the process and that is why they view him as a threat to democracy. “
We really do need to create a better word for this governmental process we term “democracy”. I don’t think that word means what you (or I) think it means… 😉
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The “Let them eat cake,” quote might be apocryphal, but at least suggests that the ruler is aware of the public opinion and just doesn’t care, prefers to flout it and the people. That’s obviously not the situation in America. The media—as you’ve pointed out—is intended to be consumed by the people inside the castle walls, not outside of it. But for the rulers, those people in media are the people/demos, or at least as close as they get to interfacing with real people. Don Lemon is happy with them, and while Hannity is upset with them, he’s still playing the game, in a dialogue rather than turning his back on the system entirely and trying to prepare mentally for what comes next, which could be the worst. The only people they know are doing well or doing an act, like the TV conservatives.
And then of course you have to add in the fact that these people are very old, and old people’s view of the present is occluded by memories of the past. Say “black people” to your average normie and they’ll think of scummy athletes, coarse rappers, people preying on Sikh and Hindu convenience store clerks in the ghetto, slimy race hustlers sucking the lifeblood out of political and academic institutions. Say “black people” to someone Pelosi’s age and they’ll think of some brave little girl in a church dress carrying her books to class as angry-faced white kids with buzzcuts spit in her face.
I wish they had contempt for us—as that would involve agency, something “hydraulic” or “cybernetic” as Erich Fromm said in his critique of behaviorism. But there’s nothing we can do to change their behavior. And if revolution would come for them, they would deny their wrongdoing to the last moment, see themselves as like saints being overrun by barbarian looters, a la January 6th.
“…they would deny their wrongdoing to the last moment…”
All the more reason to skip show trials and go right to justice.
Epaminondas: “All the more reason to skip show trials and go right to justice.”
It is very encouraging to see so many on our side beginning to embrace the divinely inspired wisdom of Saint Joseph Djugashvili.
joey: Brilliant observation/commet.