In his podcast on the Persian empire, Dan Carlin told a story from Herodotus about a Spartan Greek who found his way in the court of Cyrus the Great. In the story, the emperor made the point to the Greek visitor that the Persians would have little trouble subduing the Greeks because the Greeks were all liars. They lied to one another in their political debates, and they lie to one another in their economic dealings. A collection of liars could never band together and fight the Persians.
The story is certainly apocryphal, as Herodotus was fond of explaining history through fictional accounts. Carlin further dramatizes it in his telling, in order to emphasize the point Herodotus was making with the story. This fanciful tale gets across the point that lying was highly immoral in Persian society. So much so that lying could get you executed if you lied to the wrong person. In other words, a made-up story by a famous storyteller helps explain the honesty of the Persians.
In fairness to the Greeks, not all of them were liars. The Spartans, for example, were not as fanatical about truth telling as the Persians, but they also looked down about the perfidy of the Athenians. Most of the Greek city-states shared their disdain for lying to one degree or another, depending upon their embrace of democracy. The more they embraced the Athenian democratic culture, the more likely they were to have a casual relationship with the truth.
It is something familiar to us today. As the democratic mindset has settled upon us, the truth has been pushed to the edges of the public domain. Back in the bad old days when certain parts of the population were discouraged from voting, politicians were discouraged from lying. As we have become obsessed with making sure every voice is heard, politicians are now rewarded for perfidy. America is on the verge of becoming a nation of liars, just as Cyrus described the Greeks.
This is by design. The argument for democracy and the “free market” is that the magic of the marketplace will solve the perfidy problem. The expert who is always wrong, due to incompetence or discerption, will be revealed and ignored. The seller who rips off his customers will be found out and before long word will get around that he is a bad guy, and no one should buy from him. We no longer need a moral code in a democratized society, because the market will do the policing.
It turns out that this was a lie. For example, the drug makers lie about all sorts of things and never face any consequences. The miracle weight loss drug Ozempic may cause your heart to explode, but at least you will look good in the casket. Time after time we see the drug companies roll out miracle cures that are worse than the thing they seek to cure, but they suffer no loss of reputation. The people who needed to redefine the word “vaccine” are no redefining the word “healthy.”
It is not just that these companies are not held accountable, but that they continue to hold a prominent place in society. It is not that all their products are deadly or simply a fraud like the Covid vaccines. There are drugs that genuinely improve the health of people, but many of their products are a disaster. In some cases, like the Sackler family’s scheme to addict the world to opioids, the sole motivation behind the product is to harm the intended audience.
Consequence-free lying is most obvious in the public square. Here is a thread about a fellow calling himself Phillips P. OBrien. He is a professor of strategic studies at a Scottish university. He likes to go on about the war in Ukraine. He has been wrong about every aspect of the war, even some that no one thought were important to discuss, suggesting he is a man on a mission. That mission is to deceive, which may explain why he spells his own name wrong.
Of course, the news media is full of lies and there are never any consequences to the media organs for lying. We just went through an election in which the media consciously organized itself around the promotion of Kamala Harris. A major part of that campaign was to bullshit the public into thinking she was a wildly popular person to whom the nation was flocking. They lied and they knew they were lying, yet they will keep on lying about the next thing.
The election is a useful way to imagine the opposite. Imagine a world where lying was the worst offense to the general morality. So much so that people convicted of lying had to be held in special prisons, like we do with child molesters. It is the world of the ancient Persians where men swear oaths like, “If I am lying, I’m dying” in which the result of a lie would be death. The news coverage of the election alone would have been unimaginably different.
The question is why is it that everyone seems to be fine with America evolving into a massive lie machine? Most Americans do not realize it, for sure, but lots of people have noticed the collapse of honesty and integrity. Trump labeling the media “fake news” did not set off alarms. It became a joke and then was internalized. Sensible people know that if it is in the media, it is most likely false. The truth may remain hidden, but at least we know what option that is not the truth.
Perhaps it is self-correcting. In the last election, the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars telling one lie after another. The media added untold billions to the effort with their own gaslighting in her favor. The government and corporations chipped in billions of their own to the cause. It was the most expensive lie machine ever built and yet it failed to fool enough people to make a difference. Perhaps there is a limit to lying and we are reaching that limit.
That raises another question. If the people running the media, to use just one example, reach the point where they see a negative return on lying, how can they change course and stop lying? How do people get used to trusting the media after having been conditioned to not trust them? It may be that once a society heads down the road of democracy is ends up as a low-trust society and then dies. The Greeks never could shake their habit of lying to themselves.
This may be why people were always so terrified of democracy. They understood that as soon as you open everything up for debate, you open the door to the worst aspects of the human condition. That sets off a process from which there is no turning back until it is a war of all against all. Maybe that is the end for the great experiment in self-government we call America. In the end, we are all standing around telling whoppers to each other as the roof falls in on us.
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I recall a survey of parents, oh, must have been about 20 years back or so.
They were asked if they would prefer that their children were caught cheating on a test, or smoking.
The parents overwhelmingly preferred cheating to smoking.
I knew right then we were in big trouble.
“The miracle weight loss drug Ozempic may cause your heart to explode”
TL;DR: The linked paper documents zero exploding hearts.
This is called “hyperbole.”
No way! .. erm, I mean, inconceivable!
I blame the Clintons for normalizing lying. For them a lie was infinitely mutable and could be changed as needed. The truth is immutable so they avoided it in all circumstances.
It is not a new feature. McArthur said of FDR: “The man who would never tell the truth when a lie could serve him just as well.” FDR won three presidential elections. There ya go.
The Clintons couldn’t have pulled it off without the support of a media complex that was eager to condone such behavior, and already thoroughly so corrupted before the Clintons came along
Remember this:
“It takes two to lie: one to lie and the other to believe it.”
Nothing except inertia on the part of believers keeps the lie system going. If the world is full of suckers, the world will be full of people who exploit them.
“This fanciful tale gets across the point that lying was highly immoral in Persian society.”
This part is silly. See Herodotus’s account of Darius the Great’s ascension to power. Darius assassinated Cyrus’s rightful successor, Bardiya, then falsely claimed that he had actually assassinated a Bardiya IMPOSTER, and that the imposter had actually killed the real Bardiya – lol. There’s a great account of this story in Gore Vidal’s novel “Creation” (1981).
“The details regarding Darius’s rise to power is generally acknowledged as forgery and was in reality used as a concealment of his overthrow and murder of Cyrus’s rightful successor, Bardiya. To legitimize his rule, Darius had a common origin fabricated between himself and Cyrus by designating Achaemenes as the eponymous founder of their dynasty.[28] In reality, Darius was not from the same house as Cyrus and his forebears, the rulers of Anshan.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great#Accession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_(novel)
Lying is standard policy in all collapsing empires. Once there is a system in place that dispenses honors, money, and power (and conversely dispenses death, imprisonment and property confiscation to enemies) people are incentivized to go along with it no matter how fucked up it is until it completely collapses, and they lie to protect their own interests.
Anyone remember Baghdad Bob? Saddam had total control over Iraq for 25 years and killed scores of his enemies. It made perfect sense to lie right up until the moment the U.S. Marines entered the building.
Guys who tell the truth get canned and defenestrated from employment if they are lucky, and executed if they are not.
Even in systems that are not brutal or totalitarian, there is always an incentive to go along with the lies. The Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman empires all collapsed in 1918. Nobody — NOBODY — on the collected general staffs of those empires thought that going to war only four years prior was a bad idea. They were all military academy men, career officers, men of status, royalty. Among such people go-along-to-get-along is the rule.
Look at the commitment to DEI in the Pentagon, for instance. The last major war the U.S. won was in 1945, with a racially-segregated, all male military in which queers were mustered out for “conduct unbecoming.”
Despite a draw in Korea and a loss in Vietnam with black troops, and a draw in Iraq and a loss in Afghanistan with blacks, women, transgenders and queers, the entire general staff is committed to the idea that blacks, queers and women make the military “stronger” and that the problem is too many white men.
The only thing that will cut through the lies and the bullshit, whether they be military, economic, racial, legal, or cultural is a total disaster and collapse.
Great comment. Thumbs up.
@Zman said, “…the market will do the policing.
It turns out that this was a lie. For example, the drug makers lie about all sorts of things and never face any consequences.”
Sure, but are you suggesting the FDA approvals process is any more a free market than that “Lea” Thompson swimmer dude is a chick?
In Ancient Greece, elections are the mark of oligarchy. What we have, to them, was an oligarchy. A democracy, by contrast, such as Athens used sortition to rotate office holders. They even had a machine, a kleroterion, which randomly assigned office holders and jurors.
So if you’re going to attack “our democracy”, just bear in mind we don’t have one. We clearly have an oligarchy.
It’s not “our democracy,” it’s “OUR democracy”
“Our SACRED Democracy (TM)”
-Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
“America is on the verge of becoming a nation of liars, just as Cyrus described the Greeks.”
On the verge? We passed the verge a long time ago. I ran into a great example of the lying that goes on in the US just yesterday. I stopped at BK to pick up some slop and the price went up and the burger is now 1/2 the size than it was a year ago. The fries are even worse, maybe 1/3 of the size. Nothing on the menu changed other than the price. Shrinkflation is an example of the rampant lying in our society.
One only need to check any news site, newspaper or cable news show to see another example of the endless dishonesty in American society. Another great example is our telephones. They are now near useless for businesses we deal with to contact us with spoofing and the endless telephone scams.
What we are on the verge of is becoming a 3rd world nation.
I expect to spend the rest of my life observing 3rd world characteristics bumping up against the presence of too many white people for the 3rd world to win completely. I already observe this most every day. Or else I will move to an actual 3rd world country, that’s a possibility too.
No need to move there when they’ve all come here. And as far as ‘too many White people” – where is that, pray tell? There are Nigerians in Iceland, and black grifters in Alaska.
Of course there can be no such thing as too many white people. I meant too many white people for AINO to become Nigeria.
“What we are on the verge of is becoming a 3rd world nation.”
On the verge? 😉
Calling the “sandwich” a Whopper is no different than the whopper of calling a dude a chick. The only distinction I know of is that you can be fired, unbanked, and possibly even incarcerated for pointing out one of those two.
As you said, not on the verge – we are there. Politicians are all liars. Lawyers. The Illinois supreme court (5 women, one black man, one White man) just declared Jussie Smollett had his ‘rights’ violated. The Daily Mail is warning about a particular men’s haircut style, when the issue is alien barbers who don’t sterilize their equipment. And height is not a product of genetics and protein intake, but socioeconomic status. And the new head of Jaguar is a flaming merkin homosexual who has ‘rebranded’ and expects to lose 85% of existing customers.
I read Zman’s travelogues about the Amren conference. I remember how I used to enjoy the excitement of traveling and meeting old friends and new people, but now I just want to avoid it all. No, I cannot fix the world – no one can. I am sticking to the private life and let the rest go to hell without me. Of course we live in a world of lies – Satan is the fate of lies and this is his time. And that is by the choice of what is laughingly known as ‘the human race.’ Let it all burn.
Business is “asymmetry,” “advantage,” etc.—all the libertarian words for lies, fraud, scams and ripoffs.
Without you getting screwed out of the price of a burger—or without them firing all the white kids and replacing them with Aztec sex criminals, or without them feeding you a salad dressed in migrant worker diarrhea, or whatever—Burger King doesn’t *work*.
Maybe millions like you, once bitten, have learned not to go there for lunch anymore. Well, Burger King made a billion dollars teaching you all that lesson, and there are three hundred million more Americans who’ve yet to learn it, so the King is in no danger of ever going out of business—and if it does, the people who caused that by *scamming too hard* will get even bigger bonuses.
That’s the beauty of the free market.
America is not Khartoum. Yet.
I’ve traveled the world a bit and the lying is worse elsewhere, in both the cloud and dirt realms. What keeps the West relatively honest is a sense of fairness, plus legal recourse. In most other places, it’s a jungle, and you have little value beyond a human cash machine. When was the last time you bartered for anything in, say, Little Rock? Most of the world is lying, and its universal language is bartering.
I’m mainly talking about Western dirt people, but they don’t lie like an Arab or a Chinaman dirt person lies. Arabs and Chinamen will lie with complete abandon. Westerners usually exaggerate or misdirect, and if someone gets hurt, they do get the hammer. Though with cloud people getting punished it largely depends on how tied in and what ethnicity you are.
There is much to what you say. I worked with a very clever Sudanese fellow (they do exist) and it was a point of honor with him to rip people off, or screw them over. He was baffled that we thought it was wrong.
People are always surprised when I tell them that my default setting in nearly all situations is to assume the other person is lying to me.
I used to be a teacher for about 10 years, and while I have always had good radar for liars, teaching elevated my skills to Expert level. The kids lied, the parents lied, the administrators lied. And you get REALLY good at spotting the lie. So good that I could make strategic decisions based on the lie that would later prove to have been good choices. IOW, once you know what the lie is, you can deduce the likely truth, and act based on this.
I get fooled sometimes. Last week, a guy I hired who begged me for a job quit abruptly after about 10 days. I had checked references on him. People gave him a moderate thumbs up. Not a rock star, but I didn’t need a rock star. Anyway, he calls me up after work last week and starts the conversation with “hey, uh, I’m probably going to have to buy you dinner, but…”
Then, not only did he quit, he announced that this was his last day.
I was floored. When I say he begged me for a job, I’m talking 6 phone calls and multiple emails over 6 weeks. That was a bit of a red flag, which is why I checked references. But his old boss recommended him. Turns out: they were trying to offload him because they couldn’t figure out how to fire him. (Another lie)
The dude tried giving me a sob story about how he had applied for a different job, and that job had just come through. So that means he lied to me up front. Then he sandbags me.
I just laid into him. Called him dishonest, disloyal, and told him not to ever call me or my company again. He was shocked. He thought all would be cool.
After all, everybody lies.
It sometimes takes “two”. I once had a graduate student working for me who was applying for full-time work in the tech field. The field was hot in those days and in a short time he had an interview and accepted to a CA company upon graduation in a few weeks. So far so good.
However, it seems he continued to apply for positions and shortly decided that he had sold himself short and “deserved” more money. So he calls his “new” employer and tells them he’s not coming on such and such a date unless he gets so much more salary than agreed upon initially. I told him he was foolish and the company was not going to hire someone who reneged on his employment agreement.
Well, I was wrong. He actually successfully negotiated a raise before his first day! No honor among thieves I guess.
You can’t cheat an honest man.
They evidently knew they were low-balling. But why not? If someone offers you something for less than you are willing to pay, take it. But the honest man also knows the implications of water seeking its own level.
A scoundrel will insist on the terms of the contract, rather than seeking an amicable resolution.
Bosses giving glowing reviews to employees wanting a transfer? Unloading dead wood on some other department. Not many repercussions, although those bosses do get found out.
I also got stuck with one, a former Marine that my vet boss said “tarnished the green.” He mustered out abruptly, lying about sick leave, to a government job by using a veteran hiring preference and became a taxpayer burden. How many others like that take up space and resources around the country?
In my experience teaching a specialized subject, chess, first graders rarely lie, though they may exaggerate…But even the older kids, who have learned how to lie, are very bad at lying, you can see their unease in their face and posture…On cross examination, they fold….It’s largely the same with politicians, but they have learned how to bluff a sizable part of the population with their demeanor…But the naivete of the American population seems to be slowly disappearing in the face of ugly reality…That’s the source of Trump’s victory…he lies less and doesn’t come across as hating Americans…
Considering the success and wealth of the GAE, I’d say the onus is on us to demonstrate why truth is better than lies. It would appear that all we have going for us on that front are admonitions from religious and philosophical books that truth is somehow preferable, but in the physical world such assertions seem questionable. Indeed, any value that truth possesses depends on the existence of a spiritual world and an afterlife where perfidy is punished. Otherwise, lamentations about the dishonest nature of the world are just sour grapes by people who are, for whatever reason, unwilling to lie to win.
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you evil?”
Maybe the only good that’s come with the ascension of Vance and Vivek and the boys is that many on the right who formerly felt constrained by Whiteness™ have been liberated to let their jeet flag fly.
I haven’t been cynical enough.
Democracy is ultimately about morality. Morality is subjective, and truth is always subordinate to any given moral perspective, although the latter invariably claims to be identical with the former.
All governments promote a moral vision, but democracy is the only one that pretends it doesn’t.
By now, most Americans are aware that the FBI is seriously corrupt, including all of its senior management. And DoJ is not far behind. Worse still, the power politicians in the GOP are determined to keep it that way at all costs. They couldn’t care less about our debt disaster, illegal alien invasion, or endless foreign wars; but will pull out all the stops to keep the Deep State in control. How bad does it have to get before there is a tangible push-back? This is why collapse is the cure. When things get bad enough, the antibodies will get busy and the consequences will not be trivial. Sadly, subtraction is the only effective remedy for what ails us.
At the risk of being a broken record here, I will just observe that when the Elites decided to run this system with no feedback, Truth became a commodity with minimal value. Americans understood “BS”: it’s the rhetorical lubricant required to advance political agendas. But Americans always hated “Lies”: intentional deception. If you’re going to run the system with no feedback, you need to get comfortable with Lies.
We should create a commission on lying and how to reduce it. I nominate Hillary as director. Her NASA, Marine Corps and mountain climbing experience will be a bonus.
In the ‘judgment phase’ of human history described in the Book of Revelation, the principal standard for evaluation of individuals is love of truth, or rejection of truth. The point is made multiple times in that book, so nobody has any excuse for effing up.
God places a very high value on probity, and Scripture personifies Truth in the individual Christ, who is both the source and the endpoint of all honesty. We can extrapolate from there that truth likewise is crucial to the effective functioning of human groups, including societies. Lying, including to oneself, is corrosive and anti-productive.
1950s America was far more in touch with the truth than modern America. Wokeness is the open rejection of the truth in favor of ideology and choice-identity that makes persons and groups Feel Good About Themselves i.e., self-deception.
Amen, Ray.
You’ve been dropping some grand comments today. Quite frankly, recognition and repentance of sin on the part of The Managers would be most beneficial – especially for their souls. But I doubt that will happen.
In all my life, I can honestly say that nothing encourages self-reflection and self-correction like serious Christianity (not, of course, the co-opted Christianity that floats about in the mainstream).
God bless you and yours.
Agreed on Managers repenting!
Daily recognition and prayer 🙏 help.
What a well thought out reply. Congratulations.
The Sacklers should face a public trial and then crucified and gradually disemboweled.
The grand strategist Brezhinski’s (sp?) daughter is emblematic of the type of lying that is a charade and farce. That is, she is a part of a dynastic family in the empire. She should recuse herself of being a, “journalist.” To call her, an imperial promoter with a vested familial interest in the empire, a journalist and not a propagandist is yet another form of lying that is very common. In an honest society she would recuse herself or be harshly rebuked and removed from her position. In a more honest society, her familial dyansty would put up its own money and not the public’s to build and further her dynasty.
It is so dynastic that her husband is right by her side every day. A double perfidy of a metrushka doll of perfidies all rolled into one.
Of course it is likely that every person who appears on CNN is either a CIA asset or a member of the most protected and elevated of the many protected and elevated classes in the GAE and so grateful sinecures who will say anything if it means endless nights of twerking in Hooters in Guatemala and the Carribean.
They say a feature of America is how innovative it is. It seems to be very innovative in the forms of lying it constantly invents and then embellishes. Well, America is gone, so let’s be honest and call it post-America.
You once said something about the guillotines running 24×7 Z-Man. I think we’ll know that the GAE Regime is dead when they’ve run 24×7 until the deceivers have gone through that processing and have been expropriated back to some public trust. As for the dolts whose capacity for self-deception to believe this nonsense hook, line and sinker their total disenfrahchisement will be another critical sign we’ve made it to the other side.
Sorry for the eFFPost. If the Traditionalist underground is indeed playing the role of pushing the Overton window and bringing the truth and the solutions into the normal public discourse, then it is necessary.
“The Sacklers should face a public trial and then crucified and gradually disemboweled.”
You bring up an interesting thought here. The aspect of punishment as in atonement vs punishment as in future prevention/deterrent of such activity.
For example, one might think that such punishment as you describe will deter others from such behavior, but will it? Two aspects need to be considered: punishment and probability of detection or getting caught.
We saw this in late 19th century Britain where there were some 90+ laws on the books that prescribed capital punishment for crimes as petty as “pickpocketing”. Yet crime rose all the same. Indeed in some cases the public ostensibly being “protected” by these laws called for them to be mollified or repealed because juries would not convict given the penalty imposed—making the law ineffective.
My general thinking here is that we need more enforcement/detection/prosecution and perhaps less penalty imposed upon conviction. What we see here is a general laziness of our elected officials who increase penalties for laws they refuse to enforce, since enforcement most often entails increased expense. Whereas increased penalties involve nothing except a line in the criminal statutes and is often good for campaigning for re-election as “tough on crime”.
There is a good test of this theory, which I’ve discussed with those who promote a “tough on crime stance”. One that I’ve *never* received an answer from those I’ve posed such. I ask them “How many crimes of such and such have been committed?”, “How many criminals for such crimes have been caught and tried.”, “How many criminals have committed the same crime again.”
Usually, the second question is noted as “woefully few”, and at that point I note the unreasonableness of raising a penalty for a crime where the odds of being caught are “nil”.
I can tell you for a fact that there are some people living today who would not be, were it not for my fear of prison
In the Sackler, Mayorkas … … (long long long list) … … case, it is atonement and deterrent.
It is a signal that a new regime has arrived. It is a statement that the treasons this person committed are intolerable and do not go unpunished to suit the crime.
The Sacklers willfully addicted White men, those who served the nation in its foreign wars, to opioids. That is evil.
Mayorkas is willfully dispossessing a nation of its homeland and fostering an invasion and colonial settlement. That is evil.
They and all who abet them must face a brutal punishment and end. That won’t end treason, that won’t end drug dealing, but it will radically temper its scale and scope and the person who does it in the future. The highest echelons of power? No. The dregs. Sure. We can live with that.
Most of all, it signals that the new people in charge recognize the crimes against the people of the nation/country and that they will punish those who committed them. This is critical, for without doing so, the incoming regime is not legitimate and a shadow of doubt will always linger over them. Were they conspirators?
We’ll know we are at the end, when these signs are raised in the public squares.
OBrien made his mark with books on WWII. A completely different war: no nukes except at the end, for starters. And how anyone could think a modern war could be won with only a handful of planes is amazing in its ignorance.
A lot of it has to do with obviously false “noble lies” necessary for the regime to stay afloat. You can only mouth clearly false platitudes so long before you are conditioned to play fast and loose with facts.
Re: “All Men Are Created Equal”.
Yep, that’s the foundational whopper right there. Jacobin ‘egalite’.
Truth is, nobody is equal to anybody else, neither on earth nor in heaven. Oh wait, that offends widdle beebee?
Tough.
Equality must be limited to mathematics or it inevitably develops into fabrications (ideologies) in which the inferior is equated with the superior. This is the basis of political correctness and feminism.
The “noble lie” seems to be the favorite lie of this era. Frequently delivered by “experts” (e.g., Fauci), it is intended to prevent the rubes from making the mistake of judging matters for themselves and coming to the wrong conclusions. No absurdity is beyond the pale when it comes to the noble lie and the liars can be sure of backup from the media if the rubes suspect they are being played. The fact that a financial motive lies behind many of these lies does tarnish the noble part a bit but all is fair in the war against rubedom.
Democracy is just a show for rubes. Do the real rulers lie to each other behind the scenes? I doubt it. There are consequences to lying to your boss.
It’s all pro-wrestling at every level of government.
Exactly, but the people putting on the show need to be honest with each other. If you promise a donation, you have to pay it. If you promise to smear someone, you have to smear that person. If you promise to reward a govt official or politician after they leave govt, you have to reward them.
When things matter, the honor code gets a lot stricter.
There are at least two kinds of honesty: There’s cash register honesty, and then there’s internal/spiritual honesty, in which one is honest with oneself, and with one’s fellows about one’s true motivations. You can definitely have the former without the latter.
It would seem to depend on how expansive “real rulers” is defined. To give a recent example, the managers told the Cloud People to invest heavily in Ukraine because the United States would prevail there. Blackrock and Co. snapped up a lot of real estate and other assets that now are in jeopardy. Are the managers some of the “real rulers?” I kind of think not, but how they get away with lying to those who are is hard to explain.
There’s a lying and just being wrong. If you actually believed that we could win the Ukraine war, it would be a huge investment opportunity.
My point/question is whether there is an actual hierarchical distinction between those who truly believed it, as the Clouds apparently did, and the persons who lied and led them to believe it, the Managers. No question it was on paper a tremendous investment opportunity. The Clouds indeed were wrong but it seemingly was based on false information provided to them since the intelligence and military apparat almost certainly knew how the Ukraine war would shake out.
So it remains unclear, at least to me, as to whether the Managers are part of the Real Rulers. That they could lie with such impunity and cause such potential investment losses would indicate they are, but there is a lot of contrary evidence such as the recent election results–the Managers wanted a certain outcome and the Clouds seemed at a minimum ambivalent. Things are so opaque that we can’t see what is happening (this is why I bristle at discussing the GAE in terms of democracy), but there apparently is an ongoing factional war and the Managers and at least a portion of the Clouds appear at odds. That struggle, if it is in fact one, will determine quite a bit about our lives.
It’s hard for me to believe that any informed person believed the war was winnable by Ukraine. Little old me, with only a regular guy’s access to information and a bit of logic sized up the war as a lost cause as soon as it began (Russia being much larger and stronger than Ukraine and the Russians being a tough bunch). I think these commercial interests figured they would come out ahead no matter who won.
There may have been hedges and offsets with MIC investments, but it is hard to see how sinking billions of dollars into land not available to someone would be profitable. What you wrote is indeed possible, but many Clouds literally outsource every bit of information provided to them so they do in effect live in a bubble. It normally works for them but then something like this happens.
I believe they convinced themselves that the sanctions would topple Putin. I don’t think they ever expected to have to fight a long term ground war in Ukraine.
I am certain they do lie to each other all the time. There didn’t appear to be consequences for anything in the Biden Administration. Who was ever fired for anything? Maybe the underlings don’t lie to people way up the chain, but the political appointees lie to each other all the time.
My wife had Tucker on yesterday and I overheard a bit where he was talking to Greenwald about how instantly and profoundly Mike Johnson had changed his positions and personality after he got a talking-to from “intelligence.” They were stuck on the idea that he was traditionally compromised, blackmailed or whatever. And Johnson’s an obvious target for it, some kind of gay sex creep who pretends he isn’t.
Contradicting their thesis, I think, Tucker noted that behind the scenes Johnson had started telling him things that made no sense and were totally crazy and “incoherent,” with a True Believer glaze over his eyes, giving Tucker the “if only you knew…” treatment.
Of course Tucker didn’t *say the things*—not his job!—but he gave evidence for something I already believe, so I’ll take it: They’re not just “performatively” crazy, reciting the liturgy of their class, etc. They’re *axiomatically* crazy, acting out principle(s) even more insane than the insane things they say to us.
I think you need to account for the fact that women are now heavily involved in the policymaking and bureaucratic operations these days. It’s a major change that is not discussed because, well, we all know why it is not. In the past, the bureaucracy was run by serious men who understand the game and its consequences. Now, not so much. I just heard a clip of some policy bimbo snarking about Putin’s discussion of nuclear protocol and she was giggling about how it is irrelevant, he is just afraid and insecure and blustering. Compare this to the seriousness with which our government treated the nuclear threat during the Cold War – there is a great book called “Command and Control” that went into it, and also even with that seriousness, we still came close to nuclear many times. She sees the world as her high school cafeteria and how she can jockey for status, and that includes putting other people down instead of treating what they say seriously. That is our government now. It is like how Sweden’s bimbo joined up with NATO because it made her feel good and like one of the cool kids, and now they are distributing pamphlets about the risk of war to the populace.
This.
Deception is a fundamental feature of the human female. Shoe-horning Deception into positions of power that require honesty to function is self-defeating.
This is the correct answer, regardless of topic. It is tedious and pointless to discuss politics, managerialism, communism, democracy, or anything else as long as women remain empowered.
Speaking of honesty, the greatest lie ever believed is not just that women are as competent as men, but that they are even competent in any objective sense.
Reminds me of several SciFi novels where in alien societies encountered, the female is “non-sentient” and only the male of the species is what we’d call a thinking, rational animal. Highly amusing. I’m surprised these authors have not been black balled by feminists. Perhaps SciFi is a male only thing? Or perhaps I’ve only read authors from the 50’s and 60’s. 😉
Very bright take. While elections do not matter really as far as the trajectory of things, the recent one appeared to be a fairly straight forward reassertion of masculine dominance. This potentially suicidal reaction of nuclear chicken is indeed what should be respected from a matriarchy, particularly a wounded one.
It seems to me that the biggest issue re all the lying is the lack of consequences, or at least serious ones. If I jump off a 20 story building or drive into a tree at a100 miles an hour, there will be terminal consequences. Rarely, if ever for the lying liars. Further, large swaths of the populace are pathetically gullible and lap the slop up. Maybe one of these days, years, decades or centuries, it’ll change…
Good point. A large chunk of the public has already given up on believing anything out of the regime. Regime media seems to soldier on through carrier fees and advertising from drug companies.
As the generation that grew up believing everything the TV told them dies off something has to give here. More and more though people just seem to be willing to shrug and accept we have turned into a low trust society.
I’d bet there are also some MSM support dollars squirreled away in the CIA black budgets.
Something is going on. Popular shows on Thursday night used pull down over 20 million viewers, now the top rated shows are barely getting 6 million. NBC is still running multiple Law & Order series as political propaganda that are getting lower ratings than moderately successful YouTubers. Eventually someone has to pull the plug on this, it is just a question of what the trigger will be.
There doesn’t have to be direct CIA support. Look at who is advertising, and what they are advertising, and where their money is coming from, and you’ll see it. A lot of it is just fedguv moneyprinter loldollars, washed through various “companies” into the msm through ad buys. For instance, defense contractor advertising. Big pharma ads that aren’t advertising any products. Utility company ads. Etc. Then you’ve got a lot of ad space taken up by “pass it on” and “he gets us.” Where does that money come from?
The “He Gets Us” campaign was mostly funded by the Hobby Lobby guy. It appears to be his punishment for stealing antiquities from the Middle East and not having to go to jail for it.
Absolutely. Exhibit A is the revolving door between CNN and “retired” intelligence officers. We probably would be astonished by the raw amounts of public funds put into these propaganda outlets.
I think in the case of the Greeks, the lying stopped when the Macedonians took over. I’m not sure what the 21st Century equivalent of the Macedonians will be for the Global American Empire.
I tend toward analogies, so I think of the barbarians that dwell to our north that speak a version of our language and I get Canadians. I guess that is analogy failure– I don’t see a Phillip or Alexander arriving from the Great White North.
Good point, but look to the south–perhaps there’s a Pinochet equivalent, even a home-grown one. Coups have not been common in Englishèspeaking countries, but they’ve been a feature of South American political life.
A coup would seem easier when you have a completely centralized government and civilian police as opposed to a more decentralized one with somewhat independent States or Provences.
There are many admirable features of Latin culture. I never imagined that military coups were something worthy of “cultural appropriation”, but this old dog can learn to appreciate a new trick.
Augusto Pinochet reborn, or Nayib Bukele, on a white horse crossing the Rio Grande would be a God send.
The strong tell the truth, the weak, like children and women, lie.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)