For a long time it has been becoming more and more difficult and dangerous to perform international transactions in fiat money. It has suddenly become a lot more difficult and dangerous.
Crypto currency is replacing fiat currency. The breakdown of trust and trustworthiness means that there is no alternative. That is why crypto currency scaling problems are now biting hard, and will soon be biting a great deal harder.
Bankers have an incentive to create unsustainable debt bubbles. To prevent this, need to pop term transformation bubbles early and often, and have draconian consequences for bankers that fail. But, because bankers have a lot of pull, and because sovereigns tend to lose control of their bureaucracy, the opposite policy tends to be followed.
Popping a term transformation bubble is painful and hurts a lot of people, primarily powerful and influential people, so the problem keeps getting kicked down the road until it gets too big to kick.
That the Rothschilds were out of power was suddenly revealed to everyone when their too-big-to-kick-any-further bubble popped in 1931. Which is why today all the Soros shills say “Rothschilds, Rothschilds, Rothschilds, pay no attention to the man behind the curtainâ€
In the great depression, and postwar, the US debt bubble was largely nationalized. Additional nationalizations of debt bubbles left outside have occurred since then, most dramatically mortgage backed securities following the great minority mortgage meltdown.
People keep investing in unsustainable debt bubbles, expecting them to be nationalized when problems happen.
But even nationalization cannot kick the bubble down the road forever, and the United States dollar is reaching the end of the road.
Wartime controls will both accelerate its end, and simultaneously extend the pretense that everything is fine and normal, as it is slowly and shockingly discovered that everything is not fine and normal.
War makes the end both faster and also considerably slower and more painful. Lots of proposals are floating around to make de-facto nationalization even more de-jure than it already is. The likely result of such measures is that in the end official reality will be completely fine while you are living in the street and eating bugs.
In the Chinese Evergrande crisis, international investors were mighty shocked when the theoretically communist Chinese government, in a surprising display of commitment to Hong Kong capitalism, cheerfully allowed Evergrande’s debt to pop. The ordinary man who put a down payment on an apartment is now at the head of the line, and the international investors at the back of the line. And if you are at the back of the line, the obligations that Evergrande owes you are likely to worthless. In similar situations, the theoretically democratic and theoretically capitalist American government seldom allows the bubble to pop, and if it does pop, the ordinary man is at the back of the line, and the international investor at the front of the line. We have an ever growing pile of unpopped zombie bubbles denominated in American dollars. Biden promises to address this problem by soaking the rich, while the problem exists in large part because certain rich people have far too much state and quasi state influence and power.
Those rich are not going to be soaked. The productive rich, such as Musk, will be soaked, but no amount of soaking of anyone is likely to make much of a dent in the problem. It became far too big to be solved by any amount of soaking of anyone long before it became far too big to continue kicking it down the road.
It is impractical for Russians to receive payment in gold from an unfriendly country, or even from a friendly country with high levels of elite defection, because the gold would be intercepted. And these days every major trading country has high levels of elite defection, particularly China.
And impractical for Russians to receive payment in Euros or dollars, because the Euros or dollars would be intercepted on the ground of sanctions.
Thus the Putin policy simply reflects what is in the individual interests of individual businessmen who are simply trying to do business and are horrified that war is in the way.
Every businessman in every country has one foot in the same boat, since every businessman doing business internationally is evading sanctions, or might well be evading sanctions unknowingly, because there is no clear way of complying with sanctions, or doing business with someone who is evading sanctions, or likely to be accused of attempting to evade sanctions by someone who wants to seize money in transit.
This is making it very difficult to do business internationally.
I would like to say “crypto currency to the rescueâ€, but …
Bitcoin and Monero are both hitting their scaling limits hard, even though the Monero blockchain is nowhere near as large as the bitcoin blockchain.
Neither data structure was designed to handle enormous sizes, and the Monero data structure handles enormous sizes considerably worse even than the Bitcoin data structure.
There is no way of knowing the bitcoin current mutable state (the set of unspent transaction outputs, the set of public keys that govern non zero value on the blockchain) other than grinding through the entire immutable append only data structure from the beginning without a single error or failure, and in Monero, there is in a sense no way of knowing the current state at all, which makes it very possible that due to subtle bugs or coordinated fraud (brigading), Monero is being inflated under the covers.
To scale, you have to have a data structure that gracefully handles some small part of the data getting lost, corrupted, or incorrectly processed. And we just don’t have that. It has long been known how to do that, but it just has not been done.
And we are going to need a representation of the immutable append only data structure that gracefully extends over several disks, and if one disk fails, we only lose and only have to restore one disk’s worth of data.
If you have a single corruption or data loss issue in the bitcoin blockchain, you have to re-index, which takes a very long time. And if you have a single corruption or data loss issue in the Monero blockchain, you have to re-download the entire blockchain from the beginning, because the Monero blockchain is all one gigantic memory mapped file. Which takes a very long time. And as the blockchains get larger and larger, data corruption necessarily happens more and more often.
Once a single memory mapped file gets big enough, it is always going to have data corruption and data loss issues. Monero does have all sorts of measures to mostly accommodate this problem most of the time, but as the blockchain gets larger and larger, they take longer and longer, and failures that cannot be accommodated happen more and more often.
Trade requires trust. Just as war now favors a cohesive, aristocratic elite selected for military prowess and intelligence, trade will require a new elite. The military elite, selected for cooperation and trustworthiness, will be just the men to enforce this new trade situation. In order to design, build, and supply their modern war machine, they will have to solve trade. The solution would appear to be men with guns trading with other men with guns, with the implicit understanding that if they send goods and do not receive payment, they will ship a few more of their goods to the debtor at an alarmingly high speed. Mutual network penetration to ensure that trade is done right, and that payment is made.
The problem is not caused by the men trading with each other, but by intermediaries. At present, the man selling something will (usually) ship it to the buyer. Problem is that whatever he shipped is increasingly likely to be stolen on the way. The couterparty (usally) wants to sell, but can only do do so via the banking system and there is an increasing likelyhood that the money will be stolen on the way.
The buyer cannot improve the situation by stepping in the sellers toes or even breaking his knees for lack of payment received. Nor can an armed seller improve the situation by punishing the buyer for lack of receiving the goods.
The intermediaries are going to be part of that cohesive elite. You are not shipping through an intermediate, your men take the good to the other man and bring back payment. Your warriors doubling as shippers when needed. A man with a reputation as trustworthy and who delivers on his goods is going to be able to trade for the things that make advanced warfare capable. The advanced warfare capability means no one is going to try to steal his stuff on the way. If customs steals your shit, hit customs with a drone guided cruise missile. Better yet, hit the home of the customs guy with that missile. No one is going to hijack your shipping vessel if it has a guided missile array, railguns, and drone swarm onboard.
Think Mad Max. “You wanna ship though here? Ya talk to me.”
If there is a cohesive elite, merchants can make a deal with them. Problem is that there no single cohesive elite in most international trade.
You can’t blame the Chinese elite for Chinese made goods being stolen from trains in California, for example.
In the long run, elites that are unable or unwilling to maintain conditions that enable their merchant class to do business locally and internationally will find their revenue and their technology declining. The long run, however, can be very long.
The political class should not be in trade or generally planning trade… trade has in most places and times at least publically considered beneath the dignity of an aristocrat. The government is to ensure honesty and deter fraud and banditry…
“The government is to ensure honesty and deter fraud and banditry.”
Maintaining fairness. Guarding the cooperate-cooperate equilibrium. That’s the theme of all great kings of all time. It must have been a full time job.
There’s never anything there about how Prince So and So had the perfect policy for improving health by regulating the use of trans-hydrogenated fats on weekends or whatever.
I mean maybe sometimes there can be ad hoc interventions based on out of hand problems and there are a lot of out of hand problems now (as far as food I’m pretty convinced seed oils are evil) but after restoring order and honesty the government should cling heavily to the freehold principle.
You are sticking your fingers in your ears and your head in the sand. If you don’t know, it is because you do not want to know and will not listen.
Nuts. I have read Josephus.
He depicts the pharisee murder of James the Just, brother of Jesus, as leading to a fair bit of trouble. Jesus enters his story only peripherally and in passing, but the violence against Christians is covered.
If an “obvious forgery” Jesus would have been center stage in the references. But the references mention Jesus only in passing because of his connection to what Josephus is interested in covering: War and revolution. Reads like Josephus wrote it – was writing that it turned out to be unwise to murder James the just. If forgery, would have said that it was unwise to execute Jesus. Josephus is writing about trouble. Some of those troubles resulted from the murder of James the just, and that James the just was the brother of Jesus was a contributing factor. Not writing about James the Just, still less writing about Jesus, writing about trouble. If forgery, would have been writing about Jesus. Therefore not a late Christian insertion.
James enters the story only because his murder led to loss of moral leadership and credibility by the pharisees, and Jesus enters the story only because James being the brother of Jesus contributed to that loss of moral leadership and credibility. It a chronicler of power and violence writing, not a Christian monk. Josephus perspective, not Christian perspective.
Jim you replied to the wrong post.
Oh sorry Jim…
In the bible, the original prophets predicting the fall of Israel after the people escaped Egypt as slaves were beaten, hanged, murdered, cut to death… Every single prophet that predicted the overthrow
The same is today… Imagine Christ returning to Germany and quoting current Israel Jew netanyahu “4 million Jews died in world war two!”
Instantly disappear…
I had this conversation with European cousins experts in evolution..
I really worry we westerners are a walking dead people…. They brought up Europe being democracy.. I asked them who was picked through democracy, Christ or Barabbas? If you speak God and Christ’s word, they will simply believe their TV..
Can ignore me and remove me – everyone of your readers will hate this statement
You gave me advice, my turn to give you advice.. too many people watch porn – reprobates (even myself – I am a sinner).. there are severe consequences for making biblical predictions.. hence why I can be so vulgar… My apologies..
Do as you want and stand strong
The aristocracy in my example is not having much to do with the planning of what gets traded, but in making sure that the trade goes smoothly and they get their cut. Along the same line, they are there to ensure that if the trade does not go smoothly or they do not get their cut, then the bad actor gets a loud, obvious, and fatal lesson in why it is a bad idea to steal from a warrior with missile drones and a squad of killers.
“Their cut” i would not want any other taxes besides a 15% revenue tariff (none on raw materials) and a georgist land value tax. To the extent we have a constitution it would define raising taxes above this or having other taxes in anything outside a situation of total war as communism…
A land tax is reasonable, because land has to be defended against large scale threats, and the man protecting your claim to the land against large organized groups has to be paid, and has to have money with which to do it.
This is the primary basis for the existence of states, and should therefore be the major or a major source of their revenue. That and protecting trade.
However Georgism is an ideology that argues the state should confiscate one hundred percent of the value of the land, that the state should tax land at a level that reduces the value of land ownership to almost nothing, Which is a wrong and wicked ideology based on envy and covetousness, and no successful states implement that policy, because if they do, things go to $#!%.
It is economically efficient to tax land at a level such that if the owner is not putting it to its highest and best use, his tax bill makes him think about its highest and best use.
It is disastrously inefficient to tax land at a level such that if the owner is not putting it to what the state thinks is the highest and best use that it could have, the owner is apt to wander off and forget about it. It is disastrously inefficient to tax land at a level that the owner is not highly motivated to defend it and the neighborhood against small scale threats.
This makes a whole lot of sense. I always was in favor of a sales tax only system, in that the government should be paid a tax on all sales because it is allowing those sales to be transacted in safety, but the land tax system is probably better as it provides better motivations.
Can’t really argue against the Georgist theory, land ownership is a convention to deal with the tragedy of the commons and to give people space, but its not truly in harmony with the natural law… but it is natural law for people to own the improvements.
But I didn’t say it had to tax 100% of the unimproved value, just a high amount of the unimproved value in lieu of all other taxes.
One problem with land taxes as usually presented is they are measured as a percent of land value rather than a fixed dollar amount per acre, possibly modified by a few knowable natural parameters (access to water, etc.) A lot of “land value” is just the result of productive investment near and around that land.
I guess it is fine so long as it remains a pretty small percent of total national income, but then I suspect many taxes are fine so long as they remain a pretty small percent of total national income.
Hard to figure out what really is “unimproved value”.
Whereas a 10 percent tax on income, and a per head levy when necessary, really isn’t that offensive.
Maintaining the natural productive capacity of the land and protecting that from theft costs the state very little; developed land costs a lot more to protect, since land improvements are easier and more expediently profitable to steal. Therefore the sovereign taxes it all, which is both easy to comprehend and fits the cost curve of the sovereign.
If I have to have cruise missiles and hired killers to get trade, I’m taking a cut. I have to cover my costs after all. Not an exorbitant cut, but enough to get paid and to pay my men. Dropping bombs is expensive, after all.
The letter of land deeds in some countries still reflects feudal times. It used to be the literal truth. It likely will become the literal truth again. But it is not reality now.
You should try freedom of speech for once.
I wouldn’t presume to call you insane because I know less about cryptography than you do. Well I’ve made a study of the law and you haven’t and so you know less about it than I do. Shocking, right?
The United States of America are the only place where it’s possible to own land. Everywhere else, land is owned by the sovereign and temporarily delegated to tenants. China is the simplest example, with 70-year leases, but it’s similar everywhere.
The law in America remains the same and can’t be changed, but TPTB really hate it and unless you really know what you’re doing the courts will fuck you up. If you succeed in securing allodial title your land can’t be taxed or liened or seized.
What the lawyers did with land is similar with what they’ve done with many things. Marriage, for example. A judge can’t divorce a man and wife in 2022 any more than he could in 1822. What’s actually happening is that you were never married in law (although you thought you were). Instead, when you got a marriage license you simply surrendered many of your rights, including your property rights. You can read this on Wikipedia:
Most people read that and they have no idea what they’re reading, but I’m here to help you out. Your “marriage license” is the organic act of a trust created and administered by the state, and by signing you created the trust and agreed to fulfill its obligations (created by statute).
Then when the woman who you thought was your wife runs to the state and says she wants a divorce, the lawyers circle like sharks and feast on the assets of the trust (that you thought were yours). “Family court” isn’t (and doesn’t have to be) a real court because you agreed to it like you might have agreed to a quick-and-dirty arbitration proceeding in a checking account agreement.
“Assets” include children because you surrendered them too and also (lol) in the eyes of the law they’re bastards.
They aren’t going to tell you any of this, obviously. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That’s a maxim.
This is a clearer version of what I casually dismissed as insanity.
I guess the first one was sane also, but, being less clearly explained, hard to tell from the usual frothing at the mouth madness I routinely delete far too much of.
I erred. Sorry.
In America you “own” land in “fee simple” maybe you can theoretically get allodial title but not really.
I’ve heard this sovereign citizen stuff before, but does it actually work? It looks to me like the system just ignores your legal arguments and treats you like an insane, out-of-compliance criminal. The functionaries might be confused for a bit by arguments they’ve never heard before, but eventually they shrug and seize your assets. Mouthing some quasi-magical legal formula doesn’t stop them. The law is what the real sovereign says it is.
Do not quote laws to men with swords. That deed is worth its weight in gold, which is to say practically nothing at all, when the government decided to tax it and take it. The Chinese are bigger respectors of private property than American courts, though they are trending in a bad direction of late. If you have land in China and they want to build a highway through it, they have to pay you what you want. In America, they just steal it and pay you cents on the dollar.
I forgive you.
Do you want me to continue on this subject?
There are no “sovereign citizens”. In theory, “We the People” are sovereign, meaning that the citizens collectively are sovereign, but we all know that “the people” aren’t dictating exceptions these days. They’re too fat and lazy and old and dependent and corrupt. (S)
As to whether “it” works, yes, “it” works if you know exactly what you’re doing. Like I said, if you don’t know what you’re doing the courts will fuck you up. But the way it works is this: they have to hang you on your own words and deeds. So you can’t have any outstanding contracts or anything that could let them pull you back into their jurisdiction.
There’s no absolute solution. You can do all of this and it isn’t going to help against surveillance and if the alphabet soup wants to give you a fast-acting cancer forget about it.
But security isn’t about absolutes. What you can absolutely do is very successfully make yourself such a hard target that it’s more cost-effective and face-saving to forget that you even exist than it is to try to deal with you through process of law, whether that’s taxes or divorce rape or CPS.
Mostly when people go spouting off about their theories they’re directionally correct about the basic premises but they may be relying on specious quotes from cases they haven’t read, they’ve probably signed things they shouldn’t have and haven’t otherwise dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s, and they definitely don’t have the killer instinct or they wouldn’t be making it obvious.
The courts are running a game. Pointing out their moves is bad manners. You have to play ball.
Like me. Even now, on this pseudonymous forum in the middle of e-nowhere, I’m not really giving you the goods, I’m just sort of hinting that there’s something here and that maybe it’s worth looking into.
Normality bias.
Those days are long gone.
But while it is forgivable to be deluded that 2016 normal is still in effect, you are selling 1990 normal, which is sliding over into crazy territory.
If you “own” land in “fee simple” you can probably gain allodial title. Give it a try. What do you have to lose but your chainz?
And nothing about this area of law or any other will help your business if Russia’s gold-backed ruble collapses the dollar. At least in the short term. Although there’s probably an angle somewhere, I just haven’t thought of it yet.
That’s a valid concern. I too care ultimately about what works.
Fortunately I hear current-year reports about “it” working to a meaningful extent against TSA security theater, CPB searches, municipality mask mandates, and more. Presumably “it” will also work against vaccine mandates. If you’re 18-25 “it” might even work against the draft (which could save your life).
Again, it’s important to understand the limitations. Nothing will keep your bank from closing your accounts or your insurance company from cancelling your insurance or the central bankers from turning off your CBDC.
And when it stops working I’ll stop caring.
Are you implying that you have the technical solution or what?
And, given recent events and certain price explosions, do you believe that the timeline has accelerated, or are we still on track for big boom circa 2024?
Has the timeline accelerated in Jim’s opinion?
It has been accelerating since 1820. Still more or less on expected trajectory so far.
But I now qualify this confident assertion by saying “expect the unexpected”. The abrupt swerve from transexualizing nine year old girs to Covid swiftly followed by the abrupt war swerve suggests more swerves coming faster sooner. This could mess with the time line in either direction.
War is inherently reactionary, even when pursued by leftists for leftist goals. Another swerve is likely when this starts to bite. But they may find it too late to swerve, in which case the left singularity is likely to end in nukes.
You say “in which case the left singularity is likely to end in nukes” but all I hear is “come 2024 you’ll be playing Fallout in real life”.
Fun.
Jim, how familiar are you with the current landscape of blockchains and L2 (lightning and rollup) processes?
You frequently talk in great depth and perspicacity on bitcoin and its ecosystem, but I have not seen much sign you are very familiar with the current generation ecosystems. Just little glimpses. Avalanche, Solana, Polkadot, Near, these are all far less painful than bitcoin and ethereum –not without their own, perhaps catastrophic without serious patching, flaws, but still less painful.
We are not ready for primetime, actual scale is not fully tested and the most promising approaches are only found in whitepapers and other technical docs. I believe we will be ready for primetime given another two years, but I am not so sure we will be both ready for primetime and resistant enough to capture by interested parties. You are one of the few who seem to understand just how insane and dedicated the adversary is, I would love to see your opinions on the flaws of the networks I mentioned above.
For example, I am extremely wary of pure PoS, as if you can coordinate a big enough portion of the stake, you can entirely rewrite the history. Making PoS chains safe requires a lot of ingenuity and true decentralization, including strong light clients and splitting up the block verification in such a way that you cannot leverage a stakepool. I do not see an implemented solution to this problem, but I at least see an acknowledging that this is a problem. I’m sure there are lots of nuances and vulnerabilities that are not discussed, or discussed very quietly. I wish to see your perspective.
Near is very interesting. They are doing no end of stuff that needs doing, but I don’t like the way they are doing proof of stake. Perhaps I do not understand what they are doing well enough.
That is the nothing at stake problem. A radical rewrite does not cost anything, if you can marshal enough stake behind it.
Let us suppose, however, that each peer in each block gets a rank. High ranking peers get to be part of the small group that forms the consensus block, and how often a peer gets high rank for the next block to be formed is proportional to his stake. Then a chain of blocks statistically, on average, shows what proportion of the peers currently online were on that chain of blocks, the weight of the fork, just as a chain of blocks in bitcoin shows, on average, how much mining power is treating that chain as the consensus.
As more and more blocks follow a block, the weight on that block, and all its ancestors increases, the weight being statistically proportional on average to the number and stake of online peers at the time of the formation of each block on top of the previous block.
So, for a brigade with a lot of stake to rewrite history, it has to have more stake on its preferred version, not just currently, not just for the most recent block, but for the entire period they want to rewrite.
If we suppose stake to be reasonably widely distributed, hard to do that on the quiet. Though it costs less than doing it with superior mining power. On the other hand, there are right now very few mining pools, while stake is going to be a lot more widely distributed.
And if stake is not widely distributed, you have a big problem with your stake system. Systems that rely on stake pools, to ensure that the group forming the consensus is of reasonable size, are a disaster waiting to happen. You have to disincentivize the pooling of stake, except for peers that are inactive and offline most of the time. If stake pooling, not really proof of stake. Rather, hidden back door centralization, a central bank in drag.
A system with stake pooling is not a blockchain. It is an unregulated bank pretending to be a blockchain to evade scrutiny and regulation.
A peer that is online should directly represent itself, when its turn comes up. Indirect representation will in the end result in everyone being burned – albeit as in Monaro, peers should not be wallets, and wallets should not be peers. So a peer always represents its client wallets. But for the chain to be safe, need lots and lots of peers representing lots and lots of wallets. You don’t want a few stake pools representing lots of peers. Representation needs to be as direct as possible.
But that means far too many peers to form a consensus, so, sampling by lot. Each peer online gets his turn eventually, in proportion to his stake.
(I’m copy-pasting this over from the previous post:)
@Jim:
“It is impractical for Russians to receive payment in gold from an unfriendly country, or even from a friendly country with high levels of elite defection, because the gold would be intercepted. And these days every major trading country has high levels of elite defection, particularly China.â€
I have to pause on this and let it sink in. That is one heck of an assertion “if trueâ€.
The idea that no human organization anywhere, not the Russian security service or their Ministry of Defense or anybody, could “simply†set up some desks or branch offices (I’ve suggested inside Russian embassies, but whatever), guys with sunglasses and guns standing around, where someone could bring in an invoice and some gold bars and walk out with the invoice stamped “PAIDâ€, is just shocking to me.
I’m not saying it’s therefore not true. I’m saying that to imagine that there isn’t one single “club†of guys who can set up and conduct something so simple and conducive to world peace as this, is highly alarming.
I know I know. Covid response, for example.
But this doesn’t involve the public, the majority. This is just some guys paying their bills, like how we paid our own bills with cash at the grocery store back in the day. If this is where I’m exactly wrong, please do explain, because I must need this.
Settle the trade in Shanghai instead of London, assuming China can be trusted.
Or perhaps build a physical clearing house at the border in the Harbin area. Please don’t mind the guards and deposit your gold here at the counter.
Actually, another useful place would be a clearing house port on the Caspian Sea. Several states there that are quite interested in gold and oil.
(The middlemen will appear.)
Not Shanghai, not London, not Switzerland, and not Singapore anymore, either. After this debacle with Ukrainian sanctions, Dubai has proven they are the merchant city of choice in which you should be storing your offshore gold, if you must. As a strident anti-Muslim, I find it surprising to be espousing doing business in the middle east, but they are genuinely the only option right now.
You need to take this “impossibility” with a grain of salt. Just because programmers haven’t seen, or cannot imagine, an organization that can provide security, transport, and enforcement, doesn’t mean it does not, or cannot exist. Hard to believe, but money has changed hands, men have carried weapons, and deals have been done without computers. I know, shocking.
The pencil dicks and paper pushers have been enjoying privileged status for so long, that I guess people have fallen into an “always is, always was” mindset. At some point, some geek will be giving his TEDtalk about “the end of violence” and some Slavic midwit will just walk on stage and shoot him in the face.
Such an organization would have to have the capability to credibly threaten to take out airports.
“Remember, no Russian…”
Implicit in all security team training is the fact that defensive posture and subtlety are choices, not inherent limitations. Just as a competent police force is by choice reactionary. Under certain circumstances, the reactionary stance is abandoned for offensive engagement. Boards of supervision and city managers do everything they can to suppress this and drill it out, but Active Shooter is always ignore the wounded and go for the threat. Most cops, actual cops and not peace officers or ladder climbers or women, fantasize about being aggressively forward oriented.
A good example of this aggressive posture is nuclear waste/material transport security. They are not reactionary. They have a route, a mission, and a schedule, and they stick to it. Another example are the smaller PMCs, not Academi or the big ones, but the smaller firms that did good work in Africa and Sri Lanka. These are the firms that would be good at gold transfer. There are probably scores of outfits in SA who would do well.
“Taking out” an airport is incredibly simple. I’m flirting with disaster here, but there are a few pieces of critical infrastructure on which all modern airports rely. The towers (ATC and ground ops, usually in the same building but considered 2 distinct entities) are the C&C and the various sensors and beacons are their sensory appendages. Airspace is controlled like an inverted cake, and the tower ostensibly runs the space. If a tower goes down, flights have to divert or fly blind, as most commercial aircraft are completely bereft of human operated radar systems (there are exceptions and technical semantics here, but bereft of ATC, most airliners are flying office buildings with a radio). That’s the “software” of an airport. The hardware is the actual runway. A few inconveniently parked vehicles can make a runway completely useless. Ditto for craters. Hilariously, the rumor of poorly parked vehicles or inconvenient craters could also render a runway worthless. So much of commercial flight relies on equipment and operators outside of the cockpit.
So, with a few up-armored SUVs and a competent team with encrypted radios, one could temporarily take control of an airport. Obviously, this would change dramatically after some PMC takes an airport hostage to load up a Gulfstream with bullion. But isn’t that the core competency of any startup; finding ways to disrupt the status quo and make money doing so?
If it becomes necessary to transact in gold, competent and capable men will find ways to do so.
> bereft of ATC, most airliners are flying office buildings with a radio
quite the exaggeration, though I won’t get into the details since not relevant.
On the other hand, you are quite right that it is easy to stop a commercial airport. Because of the low risk tolerance, it is only necessary to impose a small risk in order to cause one to shut down. Shutting down ATC would surely suffice, but isn’t necessary, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident
There was an interesting talk at a Blackhat or Defcon back in the mid-aughts about spoofing phantom airliners into the open ATC system. And the IFR stuff is just begging for sabotage. We really take the baseline peace thing for granted here.
My point with airliners is that they are not configured to go places carrying things on their own. They are holding hands the whole way, from rolling back to rolling up. I assume this is intentional. Going back through old case files on air accidents in the 50s and 60s, those pilots could fly. These days, they seem more like bus drivers. Which is unfair to the good ones, yeah. But, 3 words: Pakistani Commercial Pilot.
Interesting passages from the Book(War and State Formation in China vs Europe)
https://www.amazon.com.au/State-Formation-Ancient-Modern-Europe/dp/0521525764
In regards to Commerce(Part 1 Europe)
The conjuncture of expensive means of war and weak extractive capacity meant that European rulers had to rely on “formally independent capitalists for loans, for management of revenue-producing enterprises, and for installation and collection
of taxes.â€
It was in such unusual circumstances that European capital
holders enjoyed an“electiveaffinity†with coercion wielders, achieving
equal status with the clergy and the nobility and becoming “indispensable
equals†to kings and princes.
Unwittingly, the dumb bitch who wrote this book gives a good description of how Chinese socialism of two millennia ago crushed its development. On Europe, embarrassingly wrong.
“In early modern Europe, in contrast, rulers were heavily dependent on commercial revenues because they were unable to produce sufficient revenues from land taxes.”
Sufficient revenues for war, which was far more expensive in Europe, because Europe fielded armies of free men wielding expensive equipment. Warriors defeat massive armies of peasants wielding fire-hardened sticks, and China’s propensity to field massive armies of peasant conscripts tells us that there was a critical shortage of virile and warlike men. Europe was fighting far more advanced warfare, needed far more money.
“When European rulers eventually developed coercive capabilities in the
second half of the millennium, capital holders had already established relative autonomy – even independence in the Dutch case.”
The socialist author cannot imagine the state choosing to not bash merchants and take their wealth. The absence of European kings crushing merchants was obviously the result of a lack of “coercive capabilities” to her. The idea that property rights were respected from feudal times and onward as an expression of divine law, that denying the merchant’s right to his property means corroding the king’s right to his kingdom, does not occur to her.
In Europe, kings allowed merchants to get filthy rich, and then borrowed money from them in order to wage their very expensive wars. Which obviously had a far better outcome than soaking the merchants and starving the peasants.
“It was in such unusual circumstances that European capital
holders enjoyed an “elective affinity†with coercion wielders, achieving
equal status with the clergy and the nobility and becoming “indispensable
equals†to kings and princes.”
This is the tired “money rules” argument yet again, where rulers’ respect for the property rights of merchants is reinterpreted as political power for the merchants. The Holy Roman Empire spent most of its existence in debt to Italian bankers, but funnily enough, its policies were not dictated by the interests of Italian bankers.
“Warriors defeat massive armies of peasants wielding fire-hardened sticks, and China’s propensity to field massive armies of peasant conscripts tells us that there was a critical shortage of virile and warlike men.”
The Chariot riding Warrior class of the Zhou got worn down by the endless numbers of peasants that they had to fight.
No matter how competent a Warrior class is. They can still get exhausted.
Alongside the Strategems that got them killed through treachery. Like Yue Fei:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Fei
So yes what ended up happening is peasants just took over fighting.
“The socialist author cannot imagine the state choosing to not bash merchants and take their wealth. The absence of European kings crushing merchants was obviously the result of a lack of “coercive capabilities†to her. The idea that property rights were respected from feudal times and onward as an expression of divine law, that denying the merchant’s right to his property means corroding the king’s right to his kingdom, does not occur to her.”
In the short term the Socialist Policies of the Qin Dynasty and their massive brutality gave them victory over all the other states:
“In ancient China, similarly, many weaker states were devoured by self-strengthened great powers. Qin’s rulers and strategists seemed to understand this rationale. To weaken further targets’ motivation and capability for renewed resistance, Qin engaged in massive brutality and massive bribery. In 268 bc, a strategist, Fan Sui, proposed to Qin’s King Zhao the policy of “attacking not only territory but also
people.†He argued that Qin should aim at the destruction of armies on
such a scale that rival states would lose the capacity to fight.
Before Fan Sui articulated this policy, however, Qin’s commanders had already begun mass slaughters of defeated armies.
According to classical texts, one talented commander, Bo Qi, alone killed 240,000 Han-Wei allied troops in 293 bc, drowned several hundreds of thousands of Chu soldiers and civilians in 279 bc, killed 150,000 Zhao-Wei allied troops in 273 bc, and buried 400,000 Zhao forces in 260 bc.
On the whole, Qin is recorded to have killed more than 1.5 million soldiers of other states between 356 and 236 bc. While these numbers are likely to be exaggerated and should be treated as reflecting the magnitude of battle deaths rather than absolute figures, they nevertheless reflect Qin’s ruthless brutality in its pursuit of domination.
Even under such extreme domination, effective resistance was not a likely scenario because the Qin court monopolized the means of coercion and atomized the society. Moreover, Qin had experience with suppressing rebellions in conquered states even before the wars of unification. For instance, the people of Shu rebelled (or plotted to rebel) three times.
As Qin swept through the ancient Chinese system in the final wars of unification, Qin resorted to a series of brutish measures to control conquered populations: mass killing of royal families and defeated armies, enforced mass migration of noble and wealthy families to the capital, demolition of the six states’ defense structures, imposition of direct rule with collective responsibility and mutual surveillance, establishment of settlements in problem-prone areas by Qin’s convicts, and so on. Thus, no matter how disgruntled the subjects might be, the First Emperor was able to keep them in awe.”
In other words if the Qin Empire tries to conquer Europe. The Entire Armies of Europeans will be slaughtered. So will all the Royal Families of Europe all die along with all their Kings and Queens.
And of course its possible the Noble families will all be killed too. Wiping out the Warrior Aristocracy entirely.
And Collective responsibility imposed with mutual surveillance imposed.
Of course the Empire fell. But the Qin Legalist System remained
This depends on the prevailing technology of war. Sometimes elite armies can slaughter unlimited numbers of peasants without breaking a sweat. Sometimes they cannot.
From the time of Constantine, to about the battle of Crecy, elites mattered, and even when they switched to heavy reliance on archers, they needed very well trained archers with substantial elite support.
In the Napoleonic era, hordes of poorly trained conscripts had the upper hand.
In World War I they threw in hordes of poorly trained conscripts, and rapidly realized some improvement was needed.
In World War III, seems likely that a great deal of improvement will be needed. The warrior of the future will likely be wearing an augmented reality helmet, and toting and directing smart weapons
“Sometimes elite armies can slaughter unlimited numbers of peasants without breaking a sweat. Sometimes they cannot.”
I meant it in the sense that they spared no Military POW’s at all. Preferring to bleed enemies white so that they ran out of Adult Men to fight with.
Elite Armies especially in the pre-gunpowder era did very well in narrow passes that would limit the flanking ability of the enemy army. And the limitations on logistics that for example the Persian Army suffered from at the time when they invaded Greece. Especially after the defeat of their navies at sea.
The basis for the Chinese Military at the time that probably made it possible to exhaust smaller elite armies is that river transport allowed for great logistical support for large Chinese armies in the 100,000’s.
Likewise with the weapon technology that is easy to standardize and doesn’t require as much training to be proficient at. Like mass produced easy to use crossbows.
Of course outside the formal battlefield. They according to the writer I quoted also used divide and conquer tactics. And extremely Machiavellian means that didn’t occur as often in Europe until few centuries ago.
And made use of treachery and other nefarious means to get rid of capable commanders off the battlefield. And getting enemies to exhaust themselves on each other.
I distrust that official history. Crossbows and archers have been historically bad at killing mobile troops and mostly useful against massed formations. It is exactly what you do not want to give your army of peasants when putting them up against mobile warriors. I suspect Qin won because of dysfunction in the elite of its enemies, not because their peasants had crossbows.
Warrior-led armies adapt to eras of peasant conscription by having an army of peasants pin the enemy peasants in place, and then the warrior cavalry comes around to flank and destroy them. Because China spent 1500 years getting conquered by barbarians, I consider it highly unlikely that their armies had the capability to handle elite mobile warriors.
Interesting thought.
What disturbs me about Chinese History compared to European History. Is while Europeans and Middle Easterners take plunder of women and children in addition to other plunder.
Likewise it was true about the Israelites in the Bible normally in Wars outside of specialized Judgment campaigns where all spoils are given to God through killing.
Likewise how the Greeks killed the males of a city and would sell the women and children into slavery or take them as plunder.
When Chinese go on their conquests or putting down rebellions. It looks like they typically kill everyone . Leaving no one alive without regard to age or sex. The Taiping Rebellion is one very modern example of this.
Even the Manchu’s spared some people as ransoms:
“Qing soldiers ransomed women captured from Yangzhou back to their original husbands and fathers in Nanjing after Nanjing peacefully surrendered, corralling the women into the city and whipping them hard with their hair containing a tag showing the price of the ransom, which was cheap at only 3 to 4 taels for the best and 10 taels at most for those wearing good clothing.[191]”
But what the Chinese Generals did:
“When the city wall was finally breached on 9 October 1645, the Qing army led by northern Chinese Ming defector Liu Liangzuo, who had been ordered to “fill the city with corpses before you sheathe your swords,” massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people.[211] Hundreds of thousands of people were killed before all of China was brought into compliance.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_from_Ming_to_Qing#Conquest_of_the_northwest_(1644%E2%80%931649)
Maybe the official records didn’t paint the whole picture. But if the Taiping still being heavily culturally Chinese is anything to go by. Probably not. Although I am not sure if the Taiping is the exception to the rule or not.
Only after Western Influence did the Chinese:
“After the Xi’an Manchu quarter fell on 24 October, Xinhai forces killed all the Manchus in the city, about 20,000 Manchus were killed in the massacre.[81][82] Many of its Manchu defenders committed suicide, including Qing general Wenrui (文瑞), who threw himself down a well.[81] Only some wealthy Manchus who were ransomed and Manchu females survived. Wealthy Han Chinese seized Manchu girls to become their slaves[83] and poor Han Chinese troops seized young Manchu women to be their wives.[84] Young Manchu girls were also seized by Hui Muslims of Xi’an during the massacre and brought up as Muslims.[85]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Revolution
Main difficulty here is you’re basing your assessment of chink performance on their performance over other chinks.
You point to dissolving their own warrior classes as an expression of effectiveness at war; rather, looks to me like an expression of demographic dysfunction at doing war.
Please explain. How did the Chinese Warrior class die out specifically if not for peasant armies wearing them out through attrition and helped by mass produced crossbows?
Lack of internal cohesion.
So as you said earlier about Alfred the great and his Warrior class in previous posts.
Christianity preserved and strengthened the Warrior Aristocracy in Europe?
But if the Warrior Aristocracy has died out. Can it organically arise again? If Christianity enters that society?
For a warrior aristocracy to form, you need a technology of warfare where a small number of well equipped well trained elite forces win wars. William the Marshal individually and personally had a major impact on critical battles and military outcomes. You also need a social technology that gives those warriors cohesion.
Although everyone is still planning and preparing for world war II all over again, they are obsolete and out of date. Aircraft carriers are obsolete, tanks are obsolete, artillery is obsolete, manned bombers and manned fighters are obsolete. Future wars will be won by small numbers of elites. However, our social technology is crap.
You know by my position on social technology. Reboot old working systems, and change them very carefully, first refactoring under unit test. It is very easy to break a working system and not know you have broken it, and not understand why everything is turning to $#!%. It is very hard to improve a working system.
In regards to Commerce and the Total State in China(Part 2):
In ancient China, where the costs of war were much lower and the ex-
tractive capacity of the state was much higher, however, the trading class
was unable to translate economic wealth into political power. Although in
isolated cases wealthy merchants attained high offices, the business class
as a whole was politically ineffective.
This was not because trade did not generate revenues. In fact, commercial revenues from customs on international trade, duties on artisan merchandises, taxes on market transactions
and on use of natural resources were quite lucrative so much so that
the most prosperous cities of the time were prime targets of conquest.
However, ancient Chinese rulers did not face fiscal difficulties and were not
desperate for cash. Even more fundamentally, ancient Chinese rulers considered agriculture as the essence (ben) of economic wealth and commerce
as a nonessential (mo) element. Land taxes first were rationalized in the
Spring and Autumn period and then flowed steadily into state treasuries in
the Warring States period. While land taxes were used to support state
apparatuses, commercial revenues were typically assigned for the use of
the ruling court and major noble houses.
Qin’s kings would use commercial revenues from whole cities as reward (along with offices, social status, land grants, servants) for the highest military contributions, even though land taxes were strictly reserved for the state.
(Part 3)
In early modern Europe, in contrast, rulers were heavily dependent on commercial revenues because they were unable to produce sufficient revenues from land
taxes.
In addition to the degree of state formation, the timing of trade expansion relative to system formation was also critically important. In Europe,
as noted previously, trade expansion occurred centuries before the onset
of system formation.
The early timing in trade expansion facilitated the
adoption of self-weakening expedients,which, in turn, weakened the logic
of domination in both state formation and international competition.
When European rulers eventually developed coercive capabilities in the
second half of the millennium, capital holders had already established relative autonomy – even independence in the Dutch case.
In ancient China, by contrast, trade expansion was originally a by-product of international meetings in the Spring and Autumn period. The conjuncture of late timing in trade expansion and early timing in state formation meant that by the time traders accumulated wealth, rulers had developed coercive capabilities to control them.
Indeed, control was the characteristic form of ruler-trader relations in
ancient China. If European rulers had an “uneasy†“liaisons dangereuses,
love-hate†relationship with capital holders, then it is not surprising
that ancient Chinese rulers viewed wealthy traders with intense suspicion.
Compared with other classes, itinerant traders who had movable
assets particularly “lacked firm allegiance to any state or community.â€
Merchants also “seemed odd to the ruling groups because they held no
offices and were of no political consequence, yet they could live as luxu-
riously, even spend as much money, as state rulers.â€
Worse, trade was seen to undercut the foundation of fuguo qiangbing. Traders would entice peasants away from the hard labor of farming and fighting by their ostentatious wealth and consumption. Unscrupulous businessmen who charged high interest for loans and who engaged in opportunistic buying and selling of farm lands even drove many peasants into bankruptcy and slavery, thereby making them unavailable for state extractions.
Ancient Chinese states thus generally included the policy of “promoting agriculture and suppressing commerce†in their self-strengthening reforms. Rather than enjoying equal status with coercion wielders, traders in ancient China were “inferior people,†who ranked below officials, peasants, and artisans, in descending order.
Compared with other Warring States, Qin introduced the harshest measures to suppress traders and commerce.
Shang Yang believed that the people should be made poor so that they would be entirely dependent on the state. As the Shang jun shu explains, “If the people live in humiliation they value rank; if they are weak, they honor office, and if they
are poor, they prize rewards….If the people have private honors, they
hold rank cheap and disdain office, if they are rich, they think lightly of
rewards.â€
(Part 4)
The means to make the rich poor were to stifle commercial activities and to apply severe penalties.
The Qin state prohibited the private use of national resources in mountains, forests, and swamps so that merchants had no access to necessary raw materials; outlawed the private sale of grains so that merchants had to cultivate their own food; banned the hiring of waged workers so that merchants had no access to helping hands; provided farm tools to peasants so that they had no need to buy
them on the market; and imposed sale taxes on wine and meat that were
ten times as high as costs.
Shang Yang also created a merchant registry (which paralleled the peasant registry) to regulate merchants’ movements, to subject them to extended terms of garrison duty at the frontier, and to impose extra head tax and corvée on their slaves. Needless to say, such extreme measures destroyed the traders in Qin. Although merchants continued to flourish in eastern states, they faced ultimate suppression at the establishment of the Qin Dynasty.
The First Emperor moved merchant households from conquered states to Qin’s capital so as to uproot them from their normal environment and to keep them under surveillance.
As “capitalâ€was severely decapacitated by“coercion, â€state formation
in ancient China had little chance of following the “capitalized-coerciveâ€
path and became an increasingly “coercion-intensive†process.
This phenomenon of uniformity was further enhanced by the strength of the logic
of domination in system formation.
Since “competition produces a tendency toward same-
ness of the competitors,†it is not surprising that states in ancient China developed the same regime type. Although all Warring States made important concessions to society in order to generate active support for war, they uniformly excluded societal actors from decision-making processes. At the triumph of universal domination, even minor differences in terms of the degree of coerciveness were eliminated.
My worst advice labelling me as a troll have been to close borders and focus on your culture.. let me elaborate..
Get married and have 5-6 children, stop worrying about others..
Terrible troll that I am
Download the PDF here:
https://archive.org/details/war-and-state-formation-in-ancient-china-and-early-modern-europe-by-victoria-tin-bor-
Apologies. Try this link:
https://archive.org/details/war-and-state-formation-in-ancient-china-and-early-modern-europe-by-victoria-tin-bor-hui
From the forward:
“Victoria Tin-bor Hui is a visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science
at the University of Notre Dame. She was an Assistant Professor in
Political Science at the University of Illinois. She received a Ph.D.
from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the John
M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, the Center
for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, the
Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of
Notre Dame, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Insti-
tute for the Study of World Politics.”
The snippet you posted is interesting, and I love textbook style writing, but that’s like saying i enjoy ska music lol. The authoress seems like a Cathedral agent, so the source is questionable. Consider the framing deployed in the forward:
“The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in
having a multistate system in international relations and liberal democ-
racy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric per-
spective maintains that China is destined to have authoritarian rule
under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and
Warring States periods (656–221 bc) was a system of sovereign ter-
ritorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. In both
cases this formative period witnessed the prevalence of war, formation
of alliances, development of centralized bureaucracy, emergence of cit-
izenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book exam-
ines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced
opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe
challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks
and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive
universal empire.”
Observe the buzzwords, the implicit disdain, the complete disregard for religiosity, spiritual inclination, and the facts of why there can be such a thing as a “Eurocentric conventional wisdom.” Imagine a book explaining how literate people unfairly prize letters over pictograms. On its face, ridiculous.
That being said, the forward/intro/beginning bit is the part the apparatchiks and commissars read to guarantee compliance, so that tends to be the place to put buzzwords and BS.
Looking forward to reading it, thank you for sharing.
Okay, I know the reference of the dunning Krueger study.. you are using khazarian Jewish names that wish full scale war with Russia and China.. didn’t they escape Russia to invade the USA? A people that converted to judiasm around 1100 ad (think similar to Ashkenazi Jews) just to fight both Russia and the middle East at the same time.. completely obliterated by Russia.. is this round 2 using us stupid goyim ?
Thought you used this name as a joke, but go for whatever you want
It’s just a name (The Krueger effect) or overestimating yourself.
This might surprise you, but I’m not really a ghost.
Anyway, what is your solution to these globohomos trying to wreak everthing.
Ye ye ye..
20 different names will vouch that porn and meds are the solution..
The wallenberg family got back so fast or you are the unnamed and faceless minions pushing goyim to war
I only endorse medicinal Martell.
Really mustn’t bother you that every single one of you are not allowed to enter china within this lifetime (Japanese similar stance)
Clearly the Chinese and Japanese haven’t been taking their meds and are disgusted by your pornography
Very upsetting as soon as I said turquoise eyes, right ?
I know white women watch your garbage from gay men writing their life out (sex and the city.. I believe khazarian Jewish gay men writing about their lifestyle and changing the male homos to women so that women would watch)
as you produce porn to weaken white men…
It’s odd every single multi billionaire khazarian is no longer welcome to china, right ? ä½ çš„æœ‹å‹æ²¡æœ‰å‘Šè¯‰ä½ 呢？
Subvert every group you encounter ? Right ?
Meds.
And here it is for everyone to see..
Prefer porno and meds over wife and children.. good luck to anyone who listens to this garbage
Chinese prefer porn and meds to children even more than westerners, and in fact mandated one child per chinese family and no more for a very long time, with exceptions for non-chinese ethnicities and for wealthy/connected here and there, and tax/fine for everybody else who disobeyed.
You are obssesed with porn, which is why you’re bringing it up. Brown Eyes and Black Eyes love porn. Brown Eyes and Black Eyes couldn’t stop watching porn if they even wanted to. Chinese watch porn every night and have 0 or 1 children.
Isn’t the wallenberg family a higher up manager compared to you khazarians ? Don’t you have more pornos to produce ?
I don’t make porno, take meds.
Now that you mention it I do, let me give your mom a quick call
The pharmaceutical jew meme primarily arose as a means of devalidating people who notice patterns.
‘what, you think harvard rules the world? lol take meds schizo’
Yes but Ash really is schizo and should take meds.
My Jimcoins are still on distraction troll. His comments are like schizo chum.
There are actual schizos, but popularly trafficked chemical lobotomies relate to the problem in a manner akin to solving the problem of a flickering light bulb by cutting power to the house.
That’s why I prefer “touch grass”
I’ve used the phrase myself in the past, when i know im dealing with the sort of person who likes to use it alot themselves, because that’s funny.
Which is to say im not really speaking of any hard rules here, just noting to sensitize oneself over inadvertently validating the polygon’s psychiatric control paradigm of inflicting pains on people then pathologizing their perfectly reasonable reactions to this treatment and anesthetizing it’s consequents with literal blue pills.
Oh I agree; “take your meds” is validating the enemy frame and the enemy worldview.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
What you are describing is the end of most international trade due to governments becoming, once again, bandits…The network of trust established by a millennium of expanding trust and international networks generally protected by sovereigns..When Italy and other countries simply confiscate private wealth because of a person’s ethnicity or affiliations, that is a return to the dark ages…
Nah, civilization and large scale cooperation is compatible with confiscation of private wealth because of a person’s ethnicity or affiliations.
Think about what would happen to e.g. Japan if there were a law that all property of any person inside Japan who is black or member of a communist organisation would be confiscated. Japan would still be a nice place for the Japanese, wouldn’t it?
Uyghurs controversy turned Xinjiang’s state province from being decent to shit hole in few years.
As for Japan, they already did confiscate yakuza’s wealth and citizenship. Oh look what happened? >>> Now japan now has to deal with younger, smarter, and still ambitious new criminal organization. Certified 200IQ move.
That’s internal punishment of citizens or squatters, which doesn’t need to interfere with international trade, and common enough everywhere…But if a nation starts seizing payments or goods involved in trade, business is likely to drastically reduce that trade because of the losses…
Small quantities of gold are not terribly difficult to move, and won’t work for settling large international transactions but could probably still facilitate a lot of minor commerce. Capitalist refugees will still need secrets to a fortune in their head before fleeing to Dubai, but you need to move about 6 pounds of gold for a modest house, and just a few ounces for modest monthly commerce.
If we do not get something that scales better than Bitcoin, can it not end up that large international transactions are settled in Bitcoin, and the fortunes of wealthy capitalists are stored in Bitcoin, with much day-to-day commerce taking place in gold or other metals (or in bills backed by trusted parties with gold, which will inevitably fail every now and then in the absence of a government to will it otherwise), with regionally varying exchange rates between gold or other metals and Bitcoin?
Thus not much gold moves large distances. But a Russian oilman that wants to open a refinery in India sells his oil in Russia to Russians for gold, trades that gold at the Russian exchange rate with the Russian (possibly central) bank for Bitcoin, travels to India with his fortune in his head, arrives in India and sells his Bitcoin at the Indian exchange rate to the Indian (possibly central) bank for gold, which gold he uses to pay laborers to build and operate a refinery, which gold the laborers use to buy their daily bread.
Yes I could see that. Ultimately it will come down to what the non-GAE powers (Russian/India/China) choose to hold on their balance sheet. Right now I’m seeing gold on their balance sheets and not bitcoin. Money is always a shared delusion.
I don’t envision this happening under the presently existing formalities as much as a way to reconcile Bitcoin’s transaction frequency limit and gold’s transaction size and distance limit into a somewhat functional system.
Gold as a shared delusion seems mighty resilient. 200 years ago, an ounce of gold would buy you a good pistol and a nice suit of clothes. Same was true 100 years ago, same is true today. Crypto may demonetize gold, but I think a man with a big pile of gold in a vault feels more financially secure than a man with a secret that unlocks a big pile of bitcoin.
But, how much of the gold on the balance sheets of these nations is actual gold, and how much of it is just a promise to deliver gold at some point in the future?
Silver as a shared delusion was mighty resilient for thousands of years. Then came the telegraph. Modern computing, communications, and cryptography technology will do, is already doing, to gold what the telegraph did for silver.
The telegraph did for silver, because silver’s niche was to represent moderate amounts of value, and for moderate amounts of value, trust and reputation suffices to move ownership of value, which can be done by telegraph. Large amounts of value, still a problem for which gold is a solution. But the blockchain makes a better solution.
What’s the deal with this Trump stuff? Apparently there is a long gap in phone records from Jan 6. Lots of talk about this being a “cover up†and highly illegal activity likely to have taken place. Is this the beginning of them killing Trump and his entire family or is it just more nothing from the left.
It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen with Trump. Seems there is disagreement among the elite with what to do with him.
Trump should follow Soekarno’s example after having his power stolen by Soeharto, excommunicated in middle of nowhere till he died of old age.
Indeed there is. And also disagreement on the latest swerve in the left singularity. But preparations for stealing the 2022 election even more thoroughly than the 2020 election, though with rather more discretion, are rolling forward. A final decision on what to do about Trump may well be delayed pending further decisions on how much pretense of democracy to continue with.
This is taking longer than I expected. Electoral matters were paused for Covid worship and then war. They are unlikely to stay paused.
Perhaps this is the internal libertarian in my head that I can’t completely get rid of, but taxation seems like theft. Challenging myself why I feel this way, I settled on the lack of transparency.
Every year, on one day of that year, I have to take a certain amount of money and mail it to a stranger. The stranger tells me the amount. The stranger never tells me where my money goes, or what it does. The stranger has some friends that apparently use my money. Some of them teach little boys to be girls. Others give guns to low IQ mud people. Still others create new rules for me to follow, and hire their friends to find me and punish me if I violate. I can’t question the amount. I have no say in the process.
If King Wulfgar wants to field warriors and build cruise missiles, bully for him, I’ll send him some sons. But if he wants me to pay for his war band, I better get some receipts. If taxes came with receipts, I think a lot of bullshit and skulduggery would be obviated.
God told Israelites beforehand that they’ll have to pay taxes if Israelites wanted live under mortal kingdom and mortal king. So the concept of paying taxes under kingship in return for protection already existed since ancient times.
Your frustration should be directed to current rot in the system not on concept of taxation itself.
I’ve heard personally few white men from EU happily paying their socialist taxes because they received a lot in return.
Taxes as I group dues versus taxes as outgroup theft. We are not paying our dues to an organization we are part of, we pay tribute to an insane foreign government that attacks us with the money it steals. If my taxes were helping guarantee a supply of pleasant virgin pussy, I would pay gladly.
I probably would never provide receipts for my taxes, but when your daughter runs away from home and gets dragged back, hymen intact, by my men, that is all the receipt you could ask for. You pay taxes to me so that you know that if you need it, I will have your back. It is the difference in knowing that the taxes benefit you and that you are on the inside line with the gang that makes it bearable. If you got a line item receipt detailing how your money went to chopping little boys balls off and teaching little girls to suck nigger cock, is that really going to make you feel better?
Damn, Wulfgar. Nice. I bitch and moan, because I’m naturally an Eeyore type, but with that comment you have my full support for the throne. Imagine having leaders who weren’t pansies who hate you.
First off, you know we would be working together, not the point. Second, having to provide receipts is an excellent actual check/balance for the King, only doing things that make sense. Not for you, Your Grace, for you are wise and majestic. But your grandsons may not be so… appropriate…
If USG had to provide an expense sheet, I think things would be marginally more manageable, but I don’t think it would magically fix things.
I mean in the sense of theoretical King Wulfgar and theoretical Freeman Kunning. The King’s budget is for the King to know. If you try to get a balance sheet, the King will lie if necessary, which just incentivises deception, which is bad. A balance sheet changes nothing. Even if you had one it would not make it possible for you to change things.
You–correctly–sense that you are being robbed in the form of taxes. Your money is going to your enemies to be used against you. You have never been taxed by a King that did so for the benefit of all. Your entire experience with taxation is funding people who want to turn your daughters into whores and your sons into cucks. Have you ever paid dues to an organization that worked on your behalf? That is taxation, but it is not theft. It is paying your share of the organization’s costs. That is how a neoreactionary tax system would feel. The sense of belonging to a larger system that will fight your enemies with you.
“I probably would never provide receipts for my taxes, but when your daughter runs away from home and gets dragged back, hymen intact, by my men”
How old is she, if he doesn’t have her married off by 20 at the latest she should not be hymen intact.
An interesting discussion that happened a lot in my polisci department at uni centered on why the balloon never went up in the Cold War. As reactionaries, we know that America is a communist country, and communists don’t fight Communists. But you cannot imagine the confusion and consternation of normies and progressives trying to puzzle it out.
It just occurred to me that now, in the year of our lord 2022 ±5, we are the closest we have ever been to a strategic nuclear exchange. For the first time in our history, a communist country is opposed to a nationalist country, both with ICBMs, and a hot war on their boundaries. Has the doomsday clock been changed? Have we removed the spare dildos and transition meds from the fallout shelters in NYC? Is anyone really concerned about this in the Circles that Matter? I shared a video with Mearsheimer and others from the Realist school, and they’re frightened, but no one listens to them.
USG/GAE is incredibly exposed to a first strike at the moment due to malaise and infighting. I don’t wish this for my kids, but it’s hard to imagine a better time to extirpate the most depraved and dangerous faction from the world scene. This may seem silly, but it could be that a civil war in the US would be humanity’s best chance at averting nuclear catastrophe. It is by far the better option.
I can’t see civil war happening. There’s a lack of leadership and testosterone. You can put a rifle in a man’s hands, but without the will to use it, he’s useless.
Nuclear war may come. But, you wont know beforehand. May not even get warning sirens. Best to leave the city and avoid living near any military installation. DC will probably be the first hit.
Civil war was the wrong term. Unraveling is slightly better. There is localized testosterone, leadership, and initiative. It cannot translate to national, or even state level leadership because we have become a satirical society of fools and lampoons. Earnestness, honor, honesty, seriousness, all the attributes that are required are fodder for derision and mockery. But if the ineptitude of the federal class gets to a certain point, there will be a breakdown, and into that breech will poor any and all who wish to take something, be it the neighbor’s wife or the county water supply. I think this is what China is angling for, abetted by Russian self-interest. Russia is in the act of destabilizing the GAE’s martial legend, and China is aiming to shatter the dollar and/or the social fabric of the GAE Core. We shall see what the Covid 0 policy does over the next 6 months, combined with Bidenomics and SWIFTicide. If the wheels come off domestically, they only need to start pouring in weapons and support to any and all sides, instead of ICBMs.
A US Civil war might start out kind of like the Special Olympics. Sure, there’s a lack of leadership and T, but that’s on BOTH sides.
If anyone were to survive nuclear holocaust it would be billionaires. They can buy underground shelters and supplies that the run of the mill peasant prepper can only dream of.
They don’t seem all that worried yet, but when the billionaires run to the shelters, it’s time to worry.
Nuclear war, while undoubtedly enormously bad, is exaggerated. Most of my family and friends, though far from all of them, would be OK.
It would make a mighty big dent in America, but whether America continued as a nation, and whether it continued the war, would depend on internal events. Nukes alone would not end the war, though they would undoubtedly make the survivors think about it.
Nuclear holocaust is overblown. It is not as bad as it was made out to be. What you have to worry about is the complete collapse of society in the aftermath. That is what will get you. Not the bombs, but the people the bombs did not get. A bunker is not going to save you from that. Someone can always come over, blow open the bunker, and take your carefully gathered supplies.
I’d imagine billionaires could afford blast proof bunkers, not to mention enough room, guns, and supplies for his entire security team but I understand your point.
When society breaks down, the shared delusion that money is worth something goes away. A billionaire becomes just a smart, driven man surrounded by men with guns. He might maintain his grip, but if I was a post-apocalyptic warrior, I would not be taking orders from the likes of Jeff Bezos.
Billionaires aren’t going to keep their wealth in Fedgov Fiat, literally none of them do that.
What good is a 10% stake of Amazon when you cannot transport products and the warehouses got nuked? Most of them have their wealth in things that rely on a functioning society. After a widespread nuclear exchange, all those things are irrelevant.
They are talking about wealthy people having far more paper money to spend now on items that will be valuable then.
Until someone else shows up to take them.
If SHTF here every billionaire is going to be in Asia Switzerland or the Carribbean like that…
If you’re a billionaire with a significant workforce, it shouldn’t be all that hard to identify 30 or 40 guys in your company who have seen the elephant and have the code of honor: stays bought. A fair number of companies have their own organic ERT teams, which would be a good place to discreetly recruit that 30 or 40 SHTF team. Were I in said billionaire’s place, I don’t think I’d have any problem at all arranging for 30-40 such guys per site retaining loyalty to me post-apocalypse, even were I working without significant personal charisma. You just gotta identify the ‘stays bought’ types and treat them well.
Nuclear holocaust is not overblown because of the collapse of society in the aftermath. Nearly all industrial centers are targets. Your skilled technical workforce lives near the industrial centers and would get caught up in the blasts. Not only would things like oil refineries be gone, but the people who have the knowledge to build, operate, and maintain would be dead. That extends to nearly all industrial production including fertilizer and food production.
It would be a return to pre-industrial life which means a return to a world with a far lower carrying capacity for population. You’re going to need a bunker to have some level of security for your gathered supplies because those are not replenishing any time soon. This is especially true for food which would be in extremely short supply. This is not to say you won’t need a team to help defend your bunker, but base of operation would need to be established for basic security.
Not true. Factories, warehouses, trucks, and all related stuff has been fleeing the cities for a long time.
Google earth Tesla’s Gigafactory. The industrial center where it is located is absolutely typical of modern industry.
It is a safe distance from any urban area. Perhaps the industrial center itself qualifies as a target, but there are only enough nukes to take out one percent of the land area of the United States, and there are only a few thousand nukes. A megacity has enough high value target area to soak up a very large number of nukes.
Real wealth, and to a very substantial extent, real technology, is relocating away from the cities to the exurbs. I live in the back end of the middle of nowhere, and there is quite a bit of high technology located not very far from me.
A nuclear war would get only a small fraction of the factories and related stuff. It would get rather more of the people who make high tech happen, but considerably less than fifty percent. Use the nuke detonation map to see what is needed try to take out what is in New York State and Massachusetts.
Use a big screen, and have the nukemap in one half of your screen, and google earth in the other half.
When you walk the detonations over New York city, very destructive. If you are trying to see what is needed to take out places outside the megacities, you will be clicking away for a long time.
Mostly it is going to take out the quasi statal FIRE economy, which is for the most part parasitic and destructive, value consuming rather than value creating. If the sovereign is re-orienting the economy to war, he would hardly notice.
The industrial center where the Teslagiga factory (near Reno) is located is a long way from any potential targets, other than itself, and it itself is so spread out that it would require an unreasonably large number of nukes. If you start doing places like Reno on the nuke map, you are going to run out of nukes mighty fast. There are a great many such places, and they are mighty spread out, and that is where the vast majority of our factories and a large and rapidly increasing portion of our high tech is located.
If you are nuking Reno, you are going to need a lot of nukes before you get around to nuking the Giga factory at Electric avenue. You will get tired of clicking. And once you have simulated so thoroughly nuking Reno that you get the giga factory, zoom out on Google Earth, and zoom in to some other random spot on the map.
When you simulate nuking New York city, the area of effect of a nuke looks mighty big. When you simulate nuking the outskirts of Reno, does not look so big.
In the case of a Russian nuclear first strike, should one assume that each of the some 58 US nuclear power plant sites would be targeted?
I’d guess so as it would have a large return in disrupting the power grid and possible additional damage if the the plants meltdown, plus make it harder to build future atomic weapons.
Does anyone have a map they recommend that shows likely nuke targets in the US? There’s a lot that I like about where my family is, but we’re definitely considering moving further to the interior as there is infrastructure here that would be a likely target in a heavy first strike scenario.
You wouldn’t need to waste a nuke on the nuclear plants; if they lose power permanently (+1-4 months) their backup systems will fail, and they’ll melt down… if they’re Gen 01 or 02 reactors. Gen 03 reactors are built so that the cooling water is also the shielding that sustains the reaction. If they lose water, they stop reacting.
The 10 biggest cities, the ten biggest industrial zones, the 10 biggest concentrations of USM infrastructure. These would be the targets of a first strike. Add to this the carriers and the overseas bases with nuclear stockpiles. Basically, you have to just be lucky and ready to hunker down and move. So prayer or living in a geo-strategically worthless country… but this means you live in oogabooga land, and once the first world cuts the agronomic-technological umbilical cord, you’re equally fucked.
Check out the land area of the ten biggest industrial zones on google earth. And how big are they in terms of total production.
These days, industrial zones are rather low density.
Someone should produce a big bitmap of the united states, pulled off google earth imagery, with area of effect of two thousand nukes on likely targets. Assume four fifths of the Russian arsenal. Assume five pound over pressure is sufficient to cause widespread destruction. Over a considerably larger area, anyone in line of sight of the blast will get burns likely to prove fatal, but for likely target areas, most people will not be in line of sight (though quite a lot will be). I made a very small start on that project, but found it was a big job. Once you have covered New York and San Francisco, you very quickly get to the point where it is hard to figure out what is a likely target and you are starting to make a dent in your nuke budget.
Why nuke the whole area? Just take out the transportation hubs or routes, and you do not have to waste nukes. A couple of low air burst nukes should start a firestorm that will do damage to the city commensurate with area saturation nuclear bombardment. With the city burning and no food or supplies going in or out, you move on to the next city. I would not be targeting infrastructure, but transportation. Does not matter if you have manufacturing capability if you cannot feed the people who run it or supply it with raw materials.
First, target military installations, then transport. How many bridges into DC? What happens to DC if you take them out? Do that to Manhattan/New York City, LA, San Francisco. About the only area I would actual saturation bombard would be Boston. The rest can be handled by isolating them. Even if you have the ability to rescue cities, how many can you do at a time? Can you handle all the East and Left Coast metropolii getting the same treatment?
You do not need that many nukes to effectively destroy a city. Between the damage to the transportation systems, the desperate flight of city refugees, and the raging superfires should do for them. Let the exurbs deal with the panicked masses. Once organized air defense is dead, you can let long-range bombers to the grunt work of vaporizing supply convoys and repair convoys. Fly them over, launch cruise missiles with conventional warheads, and make it nearly impossible to move supplies at scale.
This actually plays into your point about network penetration, Jim. Three hundred nukes across a massive metropolis are less effective than thirty nukes in the right spot. Bomb the right spots and you can save your nukes for someone else.
A massive nuclear strike would not only do a lot of damage to food production and processing, it would probably destroy virtually all transportation logistics..The result would be mass starvation even in most places not directly affected by the bombs, probably 90-95% of the population dead…
Transportation logistics is warehouses and trucks. Which are located in the same sorts of places as the gigafactory. Nukes are not going to hit many of them.
The unproductive value destroying quasi statal FIRE economy is going to get it in the nads. The real economy, not so much.
If all nukes fly, about one percent of the land area of the United States gets it. The real economy is mostly near that one percent, but outside of it.
Try it on google earth and nukemap.
There’s only 135 refineries in the US, some of them quite small. Many are near population centers and other targets. Hitting just the top 10 takes 4 million bdp offline. I haven’t run the numbers yet to figure out the optimal locations to hit, but that’s a lot of petrochemicals offline for a long time. Petrochemicals going offline means a bunch of other industries no longer have inputs including agriculture.
Much of industry is also intensely automated. What does EMP results look like?
The older ones are near cities. The newer ones are a bit further than the factories and warehouses. Nuclear war is going to make a big dent, but again, most of the refining capability is going to survive, pretty much the same situation as with factories and warehouses.
The biblical prophecy predicts the merchants weeping when Babylon burns, cheerfully assuming the merchants are not in Babylon when it burns. Seems like that might be fulfilled. It will not be that the goods are destroyed, or that the equipment and organization for delivering goods will be destroyed, or that the capability to produced goods will be destroyed, rather the problem will be that the last mile step for delivering goods your customers will be destroyed, along with most of those customers.
Emp blasts are very high altitude, they don’t have much physical blast impact at ground level. And conversely, blast that knock down houses and suchlike do not have much emp effect. Emp warfare is going to directly at briefly shutting down the enemy’s eyes and ears. But it will hit an enormous area. Anything attached to a sufficiently long wire, for example stuff attached to the power grid and copper telephone grid, is going to be in effect struck by a small lightning bolt. If your laptop is on battery, no problem. If it is attached to the charger, likely to get fried. It is not hard to build surge protectors that can short out any emp pulse, no matter how large, and everything has surge protectors these days, but whether consumer grade surge protectors can handle an emp pulse remains to be seen. Probably not. On the other hand, likely everything of military value has surge protectors capable of handling emp, so likely emp weapons will not be used.
I live on top of a hill, and get lightning strikes from time to time. My surge protectors do not raise a sweat, so likely they could handle an emp blast. Your surge protectors?
Emp protection is the same technology as lightning strike protection – a very old and very robust technology.
When the Emp effect of nuclear weapons was accidentally discovered, everything attached to long copper wires in effect got hit by lightning over a vast area. Caused a lot of damage, but not the end of the world. Starfish prime hit everything over a vast area, which was inconvenient, but hardly a catastrophe.
If emp warfare, the entire civilian population is going to get hit by emp, but these days, more surge protectors, so probably less damage. And the damage caused by the Starfish test was not a big deal.
But I don’t expect emp warfare. It is just too easy to shield equipment against nuclear emp effects.
The guys directly under the Starfish blast did not notice anything very dramatic, because they were not connected to grid or to the copper telephone system. It certainly would be effective in taking out big radar stations and suchlike, but not if people applied surge protection to the right places on anything big. A very small surge protector can handle a very big stroke of lightning, and the same is true with emp.
Modern electronics is more easily fried by high voltage surges, but precisely because it is more easily fried, everyone has surge protectors everywhere. What happens when an emp pulse hits consumer grade surge protectors is as yet unknown, but my surge protectors swallow a lightning strike just fine. The grid goes out, the internet goes out, but my computers keep going.
For example, all the rail centers would be at least damaged by the strikes, and likely there would be no long stretches of track intact..Trucks would be more resilient, but would have a major problem with fuel, as I would expect most refineries and pipelines to be at least damaged, and there would be a mad influx of people fleeing the cities and grabbing whatever fuel and food they could get, with many getting killed in the process..I doubt that you would survive if you weren’t more than one gas tank from a sizable city…/
Pipelines are generally buried, particularly in the vicinity of cities, and when a pipeline approaches a major city, it usually branches, with the smaller branch going through the city, and the major branch going around the city.
Pipelines are unlikely to suffer damage unless the overpressure goes above 20psi, and the land area of the united states that is going to be overpressured above twenty psi is tiny. Try it on the nuke map. The twenty psi area of effect is not displayed by default, you have to turn on that display in the advanced settings.
The rail system is of course going to go down in a nuclear war, but it is already going down due the collapse of order in the big cities. A larger and hungrier mob of looters does not change much.
There is very little real capital in or very near cities these days. Most of the capital in the big cities represents grants of power by the state to quasi state businesses, such as universities, hospitals, insurance companies, banks, stock exchange brokers, and suchlike. All that capital can be recreated with the stroke of a pen. The shops rely on frequent deliveries from exurban warehouses.
If you live near a big city, everything that keeps you alive is daily delivered from outside the city, roughly a a third or quarter of a gas tank distance from the city, roughly the distance that Musk’s Gigafactory is from Reno.
@jim, Looks like I was wrong about quite a lot surrounding industry location. Thanks for pointing that out to me. I likely am biased by being close to a lot of legacy industrial infrastructure that is still in close proximity to a city. An awful lot of that is military related industry. All the more reason to get further away.
Unless you have fiber, you will also need surge protectors on your cable (data) lines. These are certainly more sensitive than the power lines. See here for an example.
https://www.amazon.com/Coaxial-Protector-Lightning-Satellite-5-2400MHz/dp/B083TKMPRQ
When I get a lightning strike, the mains power goes out, the data, which goes over a long copper wire connection goes out, but the stuff connected to the wire does not go out. My machines that are on battery backup keep working, even though they were connected to mains power and mains power was just hit by a million volt surge. The modem starts blinking. After a considerable while, the power and the data return.
An emp nuke is a big lightning strike everywhere. My house, which is on top of a hill and gets more than its fair share of lightning bolts, handles it fine, and even though the grid does not handle it fine, it does not take permanent damage. Chances are a lot of houses would not handle it fine, but it is not going to be the end of the world.
I imagine most cable providers and the like have built in lightning arresters and surge suppressors to protect the investment in their equipment and infrastructure. But it doesn’t hurt to provide your own to protect your investment in your data and equipment.
Communists do fight communists all the time. Communist seek total control which is why infighting in the Soviet Union was so common until Stalin won. It’s why the cold war happened, it was a civil war for control of an internationalist and communist order. FDR and cohort government was full of pro soviet communists until it was it became clear the Soviets would be contesting US leadership. The pro soviet communists were then purged by FBI using McCarthy as a convenient tool.
Communists kill Communists but communists don’t kill Communists. McCarthy lost.
What McCarthy wanted was to purge all communists from government and American institutions. What FBI wanted was to just purge pro soviet communists in the government. McCarthy’s initial list of communists was a list provided by FBI
They got a few people fired, most temporarily. Most of them were actual Soviet agents of one sort or another. They became martyrs and have been celebrated ever since.
They became martyrs because the USG was largely sympathetic to communist values. They were ideological brothers. Like I said, FBI objective was to remove Soviet influence, it wasn’t to remove Communist influence. That distinction is hard to successfully make in domestic situations. But that’s beyond the point that USG,a Communist state, went to several wars with other Communists states in a series of proxy wars against both Soviet and Chinese Communism. Communists do in fact kill Communists on a regular basis.
After the Anglo-Soviet split, Washcorpers were divided into one faction whose primary goal was opposing Soviet power, and another faction whose primary goal was healing the split and restoring unity in the global progressive movement.
What you had in the Chinese Civil War, for instance, was different departments of Washcorp backing opposing armies, with the State Department supporting Mao and the Pentagon Chiang.
I was pushing back at the idea Kunning Drueger put forward with Communist not killing Communists. That is demonstratively false.
I think we’ve been talking past each other here due to me not initially noting the difference between small c communist and big C communist that is being used.
I was talking about Communists in general including communists as s subgroup.
Or am I reading into this wrong?
I said “fight,” and by that I meant wage existential warfare, not murder and purge. I feel like that is obvious, sorry I wasn’t clearer. communists are believers in Marx as an article of faith, while Communists are nominally communist as an excuse to control innately nationalist movements/cultures/countries.
The State Department communists had no end of trouble trying to manage Communists because they were unable to effect managed purity spirals and couldn’t conceive of their religious faith being used by nationalists as a consolidation tactic. Only in GAE do communists survive the first generation of Communism. I bet there’s a fascinating book that could be written about this. My personal theory is that the American communists abhorred rural areas and ethos, so they never got to the auto-genocide stage like what happened in China, Russia, and Cambodia. They stayed in the cities, took over institutions, and left the American nationalists alone in Ruralia. I don’t think this was intentional, they just had soft hands and hollow chests. Strange twist of fate.
If someone were to say, in paraphrase, ‘the continued existence of achievement gaps between males, and or whites, and or even white males, and other folk, in all places, in spite of all measures taken heretofore, proves we need to put *even more* squeeze on them’, on what grounds would a careerist hack like Biden be able to argue against it?
If that someone were to say, ‘in order to enlighten the populace, we must appropriate greater tribute from productive citizens, so as to fund larger programs in grievance studies; furthermore, we must ensure all the new priests and commissars we are training in grievance studies have sinecures, by mandating all organizations of non-neglible size hire our priests and commissars for a human resources department, to make sure everything they do is in compliance with the officially unofficial ideology’, by what rationale could he try to say no?
If they were to say, effectively, that ‘powerful advanced civilizations are a luxury afforded by abundant energy, but we must do without such a luxury, since powerful advanced human civilizations inevitably impact the share of other forms of life on the planet, and thus for the sake of the planet, we must eliminate abundant sources of energy such as nuclear, coal, or natural gas – and of course, my co-ethic rivals should be the first ones to bear the pain of such capital reduction’, how could he call himself ‘progressive’, yet disagree?
The relationship of such sorts of milquetoasts with ‘true believers’ like Bill Ayers or Saul Alinsky, is liken unto the relationship of your average parishioner with a Christian saint, or a ‘moderate muslim’ with an ‘extremist’ muslim; they may not *personally* go to the same lengths of the latter, but they *approve of the fact that they do*; the former views the latter, not as *different* in principle from their faith, but as *more holy and legitimate* expressions of the faith; indeed, view them as even holier and more legitimate than themselves; that if or where they disagree, it is not felt that the other’s expression of the faith is *illicit*, but that they themselves are the ones diverging from, or not sharing the same degree, of their shared faith.
Revolutionary Bolshevism certainly tried to take hold in America, but were resisted by one thing those other states didn’t have: conservatives.
Moldbug equates to a like tree-killing fungus that if spread outside its home territory kills unexposed trees quickly in a manner of months, but at home, trees have a resistance built up so the death of the tree, still inevitable, is much longer and takes decades.
2nd link didn’t work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Hanson
I discovered discord recently. It appears to be a fairly good approximation of the blue tribe culture. It’s impossible to speak of general realities that contradict social norms. Even on discords that appear to have serious intellectual presence of IR professionals (on the basis that I can recognize IR professionals).
Saying generally true things like Africa being a mess full of tribal tension, large urban unemployment, and limited economic potential is enough to be accused of bigotry and banned. That’s not even getting into the more inherent problems Africans have. That measures well with State Department attitude towards Trump. There is a lot of young idiots on discord, but there appears to also be a lot of blue tribe professionals as well. This is in contrast to Facebook and Twitter which might have blue tribe overlords, but still maintain large “silent majorities.” I think that means red tribe capture of Facebook and Twitter is possible provided top political power being applied to take over leadership of those companies, however Discord cannot be captured. It would have to be dismantled.
In the mean time, Discord can remain a useful tool for measuring blue tribe sentiments among both the proles and the professionals. What’s also interesting is Harry Potter forums are a fairly good insight into white upper middle class and educated millennial leftists. That is probably the reason why JKR has been such a potent target for even the smallest of leftist heresy. Maybe because I was East Asian I merely saw the Harry Potter books as a fun childish fantasy series that played into my innate dreams of turning back entropy. After all, what is magic if not the antithesis of entropy?
It was shocking to me during graduate school to see large numbers of fellow American graduate students in their mid 20s to mid 30s having group viewings of the movies. The blue tribe bible is the Harry Potter books. They appear to absorbed a child’s fantasy book’s moral values to such an extent that it’s their basis of world view.
In hindsight this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Children stories have historically been how parents install moral values into their child. Little Red Riding Hood is ultimately stranger danger for children. If conservatives wish to win any culture war, they will have to start making popular children stories. Vox Day is a blowhard who is not nearly as smart as he seems to think he is. He is still very intelligent but nowhere close to some of the intellectual giants out there that make you question if they’re human. Vox Day is also one of the few cultural conservatives who seems interested in creating children’s stories. Who else is there?
Japanese culture appears to be acting as a cultural crutch for many on the right. Asian morality is ultimately alien to the west and cannot really compete because it’s not a diametrically opposed moral system. That means East Asian mindset runs on parallel contradictory logic; we are inherently comfortable with believing that man is as weak as a fly and as strong as a bear at the same time. It is inherently going to be weaker than western Harry Potter in the west which works of moral binaries.
Ultimately western conservatives are likely on the losing end because figures like Vox Day are few. Much in the same way Roman Pagans were on the losing end to Christians. I doubt this will change with the end of the liberal global order. That might mean American liberalism ends in the empire’s former client states, but in a multi-polar order America is still going to be a liberal anti Christian order.
Making “redpilled” content for children would be great, but two big problems:
1. Culture is downstream of power, and if anyone tries to seriously truly redpilled fiction, they will have the axe on them quick than they can publish it.
2. How “redpilled” should a redpill fiction be? if we go full redpill, normies would just reject it, but if we have to make it more “normie-friendly” then we just end up with where fiction was 5-10 years ago, with stunning brave women, and based black men.
It’s true that culture is downstream of power, but the US has multiple centers of power. Right wing centers of power have for a long time abandoned cultural competition out of a misguided notion that a market place of ideas would would be free of political influence and have a natural conservative bias. It does not.
The reason why red pilled fiction gets axed so often is that conservatives make the mistake of trying to go through left wing centers of power to publish their work believing that so long as their work is high quality that the market place of ideas would promote it. They are wrong.
Centers of power are also not permanent. They are built usually in parallel to preexisting centers of power. Vox Day appears to be doing that with comics and publishing. Arkhaven Comics which now has 5,749,070 views. He has set up Castalia House publishing in Kouvola, Finland which is publishing books that based on the summary alone would have significant trouble getting published normally.
If the RNC wanted to contest culture, they would attempt to either Co-opt ArkHaven and Castalia and provide political patronage and cover like DNC gives to Hollywood, or RNC would build it’s own version.
I really want to push back at this idea that the left dominates all centers of power because all culture is left wing. All culture is left wing because all right wing centers of power refuse to play the game.
The right does do that. Then left wing entryists subvert and destroy.
Subvert and destroy only happens if you believe in the market place of ideas.
DNR does not. Hollywood does not. It is not possible to subvert and destroy Hollywood.
RNC does believe in market place of ideas. The end result is that RNC does not contest culture.
The reason entryism works is that most of the Right wants to believe they’re ‘fair minded’. Very few are willing to exercise what I call ‘The Spiritual Gift of Being and Asshole’, and tell anyone who is liberal,
YOU AREN’T WELCOME HERE, GET OUT!
Unless you’ve got that, you’re going to be converged to leftism through entryism and worse.
You need tactics like for instance, having a PI investigate every seminary candidate. Where are they getting their money, for instance? Are they supported by an entryist foundation (most are)?
The right wants to be ‘fair minded’ because they believe in a ‘market place of ideas’. That wasn’t always the case. There use to be PI investigations and much much more.
I bring up Vox Day because he very much isn’t a believer in a market place of ideas. What he is building, so long as he’s in charge, can not be subverted.
I highly disagree with many of his beliefs, but I bring him up because it’s people like him that the right needs. That the RNC needs.
“As long as he is in charge” is the problem and where the entryism vector is.
Isn’t that true of all organizations including the left? Should the RNC embrace people like him, they send a signal that power wants that type of person and people adhere to power.
The left has power so is immune to ‘people defecting to suck up to power’. And it isn’t Vox Day being approached but however follows him altering things in order to get in the good graces of the left.
Apologies if I’m not explaining clearly. Think of it like Disney and how Walt has been followed by people who are demonic.
I once heard an aphorism along the lines of “If an organization isn’t explicitly anti-leftist, it will eventually become explicitly leftist.”
Conquest’s laws.
Conquests Second Law: any organization that isn’t explicitly right-wing will become implicitly left-wing eventually.
The first is: every man is conservative about what he understands the most.
The third: to understand a bureaucracy, you must view them as an evil cabal that is completely against the purpose and values of the organization they control.
I wrote this without looking them up, so please correct them if I screwed up, as they are my interpretations of RC’s 3.
It just occurred to me that Sowell’s 3 questions overlap with these:
1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost?
3. What hard evidence do you have to support your claim?
Shoot. RC 3/#03: should include *lead by*
> Conquests Second Law: any organization that isn’t explicitly right-wing will become implicitly left-wing eventually.
Mm. If this is the original, I feel he understates the problem. The RNC now keeps silent about gay marriage and nominates black female candidates. Without actually proactively cutting at the core of leftism and burning all bridges, it seems like these organizations still get entried to zombie status.
The Republican party was never right wing. It’s current manifestation is conservative which means 5 year old leftism. Prior to that it was straight up progressive.
From Isegoria in 2008:
https://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/
Here’s the text of the link:
Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
John Derbyshire adds this:
Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.
John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.â€
Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:
Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They’ve exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:
Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:
Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
Officials make work for one another.
Like most generalizations, these are not always true…but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[…]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.
Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others†in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.
To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:
Von Clausewitz and others have termed war “a continuation of politics by other means,†but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation’s interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It’s in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.
It’s not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary’s list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.
Atomization of power sources is like spreading manure all over your living room; all manner of heinous fungus seem to sprout up from it.
Like a ship at sea, except one group of sailors are trying to trim the sails to push the boat one way, while another group of sailors are rearranging the cargo to list the boat another way – and the rudder wheel, of course, is tied down and abandoned.
I agree with you completely Pax Imperialis. We have to be engaging in the culture war by offering our own content in the face of the woke. No, we can’t win long term by just publishing a better Star Wars, but it has to be part of the broader effort. This is a good article in describing what’s at stake:
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/the-spoliation-of-pop-culture?s=w
I don’t agree with Vox Day on every issue but he’s a man of the right who stays in the fight and he deserves our respect and support for that.
There is old fiction that is redpilled. No need for new fiction
Popular fiction/clothing/culture is really just fashion, and fashion is really just redecoration of the old.
So no, you can’t just take old fiction and expect people to adopt it. You have to make “new” fiction for it to have any chance of being adopted and popular.
What do you want fiction for? If it is for your children, they can enjoy the old stuff. For example, Grimm’s fairy tales are a classic that can be read by (or read to) any generation.
You can’t make any redpilled stuff fashionable until the present madness is stopped.
Vox Day is merely purple pilled. But his stuff is selling.
Sounds great for Vox Day.
Vox Day basically wants a return to the lesser insanity characteristic of the 1980s. There’s a big constituency for that, witness the popularity of 80s rock and culture.
The worst thing about him is hes a huge fucking simp and feminist. He has unironically shilled believe women…
Heartily disagree. People want better movies, and the left is powerless to provide them because of their own stupid beliefs. I remain convinced that Right Wing Cinema is an avenue not taken but wide open. I’m trying to develop down that path, but conservatives don’t take entertainment seriously, which is why the pastor’s daughter is a whore and his son is a fag, in a manner of speaking. Music and movies are the way the masses raise their children, and it is how the elite tendrils get connected. The pernicious influence of every evil memeplex traces back to Hollywood and/or Harvard, and they mutually support each other.
I genuinely want to make right wing cinema, and I believe I have a good starting point, but the cost of filmmaking is insanely prohibitive to both beginners and frugal minded people. The best industry professionals have base rates of 1-3% of the below the line budget, so do that math and shudder. I’m not talking about PAs and Grips. Getting movies made is a fascinating display of elaborate, fake barriers. The best comparison I can think of is the QWERTY keyboard; it’s is purposefully constructed to slow things down, and this easier for a cabal to control. My workaround, theoretically, is to host content independently and provide content for free while paying professionals to run wild with small, skilled teams making short and feature format films that stick to a core traditionalist message while also incorporating any and all narrative devices needed to engage and retain attention. The Christian entertainment industry exists, but it is modeled as a Hollywood Miniature controlled by a small group of distributers backstopped by boomercon investors. They have a narrow and deep market share and they guard it fiercely. Just like Hollywood, they make the same movie over and over again. This is a safe bet. Maybe foolishly, I think the media market is craving new fare, and I think the modern man is desperately desirous of stories that engage him, tell him to buck up and stop being a bitch. I think women will watch and love anything that strums their feelies and implies brutal “””roughsex””” just around the corner if she isn’t careful. I think teens want shock & gore. If you decouple from the boomercon idea that PG-13 is a bit racy, there’s no limit to story telling that hits many market segments while having a clear memetic avenue for traditionalist memes.
The trick to doing this is developing a war chest of funding while aggressively staffing production with only the necessary and the best people possible. You guys would be appalled at the degeneracy common in filmmaking. It’s a big part of why I left. But I really miss it, and it is a necessary part of the culture war that conservatives seem willing to poorly imitate (Christian Entertainment â„¢) or pretend is meaningless/trifling/unimportant. The angle I’m trying to pursue is to put together a stable of scripts that are built to shock and engage. I hope to find angels interested in fighting the culture war and, down the road, get fucktons of money to “consult,” but it is a rather forlorn hope ATM.
Maybe you can make redpilled movies, but you if you show them in a cinema antifa will vandalize the cinema, beat up any people watching the movie and police will arrest anyone who resists
Not so much an issue with digital distribution. Patreon, kickstarter, etc. demonstrate that people will pay to support things they consider valuable.
If you get big and make a habit of redpilled entertainment… they probably have ways of getting to you. Mel Gibson can do his own distribution and everything but he stopped after Apocalypto…
Game of Thrones though it went a bit downhill from season 5 looked like it was just deliberately wrecked at the end… couldn’t have the most popular female character ever be a non feminist who mostly likes men and whos original dream was being the perfect tradwife and thought rape was while not totally okay not a huge deal either…
They will not let you make anything of blockbuster popularity that isn’t totally pozzed. South Park used to be based as fuck… not anymore.
Interesting film to look at in this regard is “Boondock Saints.”
One does not simply create good fiction. It is an art. There is a level of skill, talent, intuition and sometimes luck required to make a work of quality. Redpill is not sufficient guarantee of quality, though bluepill inevitably makes fiction worse.
All art is like this.
The development and distribution of The Chosen may provide some insight for you. Yes, it’s super blue-pilled, but it was done outside Hollywood. This might show a way for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wy-W-pYlds
A production like this is essentially a ritual performance conducted on stage in front of a crowd, with ‘touring music band’ basically being the vehicle of coincidence.
Not coincidentally, it also has a power that reaches deep into the spectators.
In an article some time ago, one conversant made an offhand comment that 20th century ‘christian music’ in America killed Christianity in America; which is the sort of exaggeration that highlights a more subtle dynamic with basically true cardinality. It was the productions of men without chests, recapitulating churchian ‘gay boyfriend jesus’ in media form; leaving not just those desirous of spiritual power unsatisfied; and not just repelling those men with vitality of their own; but rendering those who do participate down to the same level as themselves, as well.
There is a great absence of matter of such kind for the faithful who seeks it; which at once excoriation, goal, and opportunity.
The best way to reduce cost and risk is to produce films in the horror genre. The Blair Witch Project is the most successful movie investment. Released in 1999 it cost 60k to make and grossed a quarter of a billion dollars with multiple sequels and knockoffs.
Unlike in literature where genre fiction is considered crass some of the best directors have made horror films. Stephen King is considered a hack in the writing community but Stanley Kubrick adapted his novel The Shining into one of the best films made.
I have a lot more I could say but I’ll keep it brief.
I’m well aware of the Horror Genre hack. You have a built in fan base willing to invest time and money, very low bar, relatively cheap compared to similar genres (action, thriller, drama), and no penalty for repetition or whole sale ripoff. I’m intimately familiar with Haxan. I’ve done a few horror pictures and am planning on more. But I would like to branch out into war movies and dramas, and I want to do it with Jimian Christian values and Game Dynamics. I’ve been waiting for the right time to discuss it here, and it appears to have dawned.
My aim is to do something bigger than a single picture. I’d like to start a hybrid production/propaganda house that dabbles in film, print, and audio media. I need to find funding, and I want to raise a banner for good men already working in production to rally around. They are few, but they are there. I’ll start a new thread, and I’d love to get ideas and inspiration for scripts and stories. I know this isn’t the best venue, and everybody is an expert at critiquing other’s work but don’t know the first thing about actually making media. Still, my gut says this online community could be an excellent sounding board and pre-pre-production editorial. I know it isn’t feasible, but I wish Jim had a Discord where I could post scripts and treatments to get feedback. But the hardest obstacle for me is finding the right men and associations to pitch to. Modern film is lousy with terrible scripts, shady people, and corruption & grifting. This means that there aren’t a lot of morally sound investors out there. The stuff that gets made is facilitated by those with A Message, and they work hard to drown out competing memes and ideologies.
2 contradicts 1. Normies reect redpill because power rejects redpill. If power pushes redpill, normies will reject anyone rejecting redpill.
[formulaic shill script deleted*]
I know exactly who is mopping up all the pussy, and it is not our evil capitalist overlords.
It seemed to me that you were writing a lot of your own material, but this one I have seen before too many times in too many places.
Liar’s Poker, The Wolf of Wall Street, Bonfire of the Vanities, etc, whatever. Repetition is actually appropriate here
The story given in “Wolf of Wall Street” etc is the Cathedral cover story for the misconduct revealed in the Great Minority Mortgage Meltdown”, much as flat earth and “the moon landing was faked”, is the shill cover story for technological decline. It is equally as absurd – not because businessmen do not engage in misconduct, but because the misconduct depicted in these movies is a malicious inversion of what in fact happens, blaming the victims for the crimes.
[*Cathedral version of the what is wrong with modern corporations deleted*]
We’ve all heard of the scandal of irresponsible minorities who wouldn’t pay their mortgage, yes.
The more important scandal is that the “majority” pays most of its after tax income on its mortgages even as the nation’s fertility rate plunges.
Why not say the black nationalists are right when they actually are? And they’re going to burn the cities under our current system no matter what so whatever. But if rent were cheaper and the eloi had more children, well…
Not from me you have not. That is not the scandal, and not what I have been talking about when I talked about the great minority mortgage meltdown.
You are doing a “hail fellow racist” reframe of the alt right and Dark Enlightenment account of the great minority mortgage meltdown, while gently smoothing it into consistency with the Cathedral narrative.
My narrative features a white male heterosexual housing speculator, a bottle of whisky, a childless female hispanic real estate agent who speaks Spanish, and a loan officer whose race and sex is unimportant but who is acting very like a stereotypical Jew, though quite likely theoretically hispanic. The no-hablo-english unemployed drunken wetback who wound up with the million dollar house and the two million dollar mortgage is more a victim than a villain in my narrative, the biggest victims, however, being the people depicted as the villains in “wolf of wall street”.
By and large, the people paying mortgages have children, and hyperinflation is wiping out their mortgages, so they are the winners, or at any rate less losers than everyone else.
You don’t seem to have noticed that the alt right and the Dark Enlightenment very regularly does say that. Maybe the reason you have not noticed is that you have not noticed black nationalists saying the things we say they are right about.
You are obviously unfamiliar with what mainstream rhino conservatives say, let alone what the alt right and the Dark Enlightenment says, so I doubt you are familiar with what actual black nationalists say when they are not saying what good Cathedral house niggers are supposed to say.
Did you watch Wolf of Wall Street and think it was an accurate depiction of how stockbrokers do with women? Most men who work on Wall Street do 70 hours a week, go to the bars dog tired hoping to get laid, and strike out, while the hot chicks go home with some bum who claims to be an artist. Then they marry 30-year-old lawyer women and move to Long Island, where they spend the rest of their lives sitting in the worst traffic on the planet while their wives cuckold them and their daughters get banged out by 90IQ Italian drug dealers who drive riced up Honda Civics.
lol
Most people on Wall Street are archetypal beta male nice guys, not because there is a shortage of ambitious alpha males seeking wealth, rather that most successful men on Wall Street do not trust their money with trashy low-class people as depicted in Wolf of Wall Street.
There are plenty of options for families living in and around New York City. Wrong Island is filled with communities of mostly Catholics and Jews with various other ethnic enclaves. WASPs prefer to live near Connecticut and send their kids to private schools.
Wolf of Wall Street is a depiction of how low-class peasants and envy-driven Progs imagine rich people, which is why Anonymous Fake mentions it.
I’m sure plenty have taken the stripper pill…
Took it long ago, made me sick in the heart. Gave up on it eventually.
Conservatives should wind back the copyright protections of Disney and Hollywood and Music and collapse those leftist converged institutions into bankruptcy and start anew.
“Culture war” is a misnomer. There is no culture war. The state religion has been entrenched for centuries and the state has shown little tolerance for competing religions.
Old style pre-Calvinist Christianity is a prospective competing religion, and quite possibly the only prospective competing religion, but likely would need to adopt the strategies of the early Christians before Constantine, which means the adherents should be non-violent pacifists and be prepared for martyrdom by state authorities.
There are a large number of people resisting the state religion. Terribly ineffectively, but resistance is still resistance which means war. Culture war is not a misnomer.
Do we have more resistance to the state religion in 1950 or 2020? Resistance has been building since at least the 1960s and while the 60s resistance was largely of left wing nature and was easily adopted by a left wing government, the old right was slowing remembering they existed.
Americans are abandoning Christianity in droves, even conservatives. What we will see in the future is something new but also potentially much older in nature. American sexual morality already more closely resembles Roman paganism. Old Gods are reawakening. Might makes Right. Martyrdom is neither respected nor desired.
Tremendous resistance to the state religion of black integration during the Civl Rights era, which resistance was crushed violently and at bayonet point.
There is still tremendous resistance to black integration, it was never crushed. White flight happened and the cities were hollowed out. If anything the inner cities are more like Indian reservations with more technology and hand outs to keep them there.
The resistance to integration grew far more sophisticated and complete. In my grandfather’s era, segregation was in place because you would still come into contact with Blacks frequently. Black only drinking fountains were often in close proximity to white only drinking fountains.
I almost never see black people where I live even though they make up a decent percentage of the state population. My schooling K-12 had maybe 2 black kids in it out of a 1000. My local grocery/pharmacy/library/etc is nearly devoid of them. I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
There are plenty of methods that were developed to informally maintain segregation that for all the might of the federal government has failed to crush.
Any reactionary should know that the Cathedral needs resistance to organize and fuel itself. It’s just that, whenever possible, the Cathedral sets up horribly unfair contests presented as level playing fields.
“Don’t like x? Then win an election.”
*Trump gets elected*
Defeatism is boring. Stop it.
No. America is not reverting to atavistic paganism. It is transforming into anti-Christianity, which is the endpoint of all heresy, and precedes antichrist.
Anti-Christianity is a diabolic inverse of Christianity. Classical paganism was just another religion with an alternate god, not a dark mirror reeking with evil. You will not find what virtues the pagans possessed (bravery, for example) in whatever America is becoming. There is only pharisaic evil.
[quote]Martyrdom is neither respected nor desired.[/unquote]
Yet martyrdom undid the old Roman paganism.
The Roman state religion was long walking dead. Against a live state religion, not enthusiastic about the effectiveness of martyrdom.
“Pre-Calvinist Christianity” American Christianity if it revives will be Calvinist not pre Calvinist… but Calvinism of the Elizabethan nature with no tolerance for subversive social gospels.
Calvin was a lunatic, and Calvanism is the fruit of his poisonous tree. It is going to be dead and buried, like Arianism.
Is Wojak an icon? Ancient pagan gods were often personifications of various forces both natural and human.
The Chad and the Virgin. The Stacy and the Becky. These are personifications of deep societal currents. In a way they are spiritual representations of the struggles of American youth.
They do not speak in Bible verse, nor in Biblical parable but in Wojaks. This is an indication that some form of digital paganism is coming into fruition.
Calvin’s logic is irrefutable if you accept the omnipotence and omniscience… if you accept them you must accept TULIP.
The bad fruit is allowing progress from Calvinism to the Social Gospel but before that Calvinists were indomitable in commerce and invincible in battle.
Irrefutable logic gets you into nonsense when you apply it to religion.
If you follow any thread of human logic too far through Christianity, you wind up at foolishness and heresy.
If God is all powerful, he can play solitaire. If he cannot change and cannot lie, he can play poker with us, and not look at the cards he dealt us till we lay them on the table.
Calvin followed that thread too far, though most Calvinists dig in their feet and refuse to follow that path to its dead end heretical destination. Empirically, it is absolutely obvious that we have free will, and to doubt it is both silly and heretical.
Christianity has at its core a contradiction – as do we, being both mind and body. The logical contradiction at the core of Christianity is a greater form of the logical contradiction that is each of us.
The core of the second story of creation is the question of evil. God stuck the tree and the serpent in the garden of Eden, and then went for a little walk. If he is omnipotent, he can take a little walk.
Yes. Calvinism is not a mystery religion. (Except the “mystery” of why God chooses some to be saved and not others. Irrefutable logic, lol.)
Anyway, non-mystery religion is just lame science. Worked better before we had actual science and high technology.
“The core of the second story of creation is the question of evil. God stuck the tree and the serpent in the garden of Eden, and then went for a little walk. If he is omnipotent, he can take a little walk.”
Both the Angelic Host and the Human Race was given a choice to choose for or against God and the Logos.
The price of True Agency is the potential for the corruption of Evil. But on the other hand Truly chosen Goodness as a result of Free Agency leads to far greater foreseen Goodness that cannot exist if everyone else but God doesn’t have any Agency at all.
Likewise being a Tri-Personal Deity who is Agape(1 John 4:8). He would rather relate to actual Beings rather than Automatons who he must puppeteer all the time.
What’s interesting is that the leftist priests actually holy-spiraled towards more free will not less free will as an attack vector on orthodox Calvinism.
The rationale being I suspect is that the final destination, God’s Kingdom on Earth, of course can be arrived when we give Globohomo to everyone on Earth, that of course they will use their free will to accept it and the eschaton will be immanentized.
The congenitally solipsistic gnostic experiences a keen insecurity over the powers of his own agency; he is constantly troubled by his difficulties in the navigation of Being, and constantly frustrated by divergences of it’s progression from his expectations or desires – which are often the same thing.
These stressors are sublimated into a hypersensitivity to the idea of anything in general having any constraining effect on any volitionary possibilities or potentialities in general; and of any *being* having any supervention of his volition, in particular – which often also is the same thing in it’s mind.
For the way he experiences broader ‘reality’ as such, is not as ‘reality as such’, but as if ‘broader reality’ is as if *another rival ape*.
If another rival ape angers him, then of course, his reaction will be to try to slap them down into submission; and this is also, in phenomenological terms, how they approach ‘problem solving’ in any context in general.
When he makes a decree, or rather even possesses the notion of a decree, and Being does play out in cooperation with his decree, he is incensed; this rival ape known as ‘reality’ is trying to devalidate him, attack his status, and so of course the play is to insist even more repetitively on your notion, until the other ‘party’ backs down and submits… and in such due course, has the gnostic throughout history ever dashed himself against the rocks of nemesis.
I cannot see too strong an association between orthodox calvism and poz because the modern leftist started by utterly denying the fall and total depravity of man and only recently moved on to going okay only white men have total depravity.
Well the Puritans derived themselves from Calvin, but the New England Puritans were holiness spiraled in ways strict Calvinists were not.
Moldbug points to irresistible grace as the general path of doctrinal evolution which eventually allowed for the entire Bible being tossed overboard.
So you may have a point Com, if we are talking about strict orthodox Calvinism in its unchanging form.
John Calvin taught that some people are born for salvation and others are born into damnation. 300 years later, Charles Darwin provided a scientific basis for this claim. Darwin’s theory could well be described as “Biological Calvinism”.
Humans are not “created equal”; we differ widely by any measurement except average body temperature. Does it not logically follow that our ability to do God’s will and resist evil would also have a wide variance?
I mean, look at any mugshot gallery of an Antifa riot or pedophile sting (they look pretty much the same). Is it not obvious from their faces that there’s something genetically wrong with these people?
It does make Jim’s case for Christian genocide of problem peoples a bit easier doesn’t it?
“Well we offered salvation through Jesus Christ to those people over there. They rejected it, so they must not be part of the elect.â€
Calvinism is dead, except for variants that are not very Calvinist. It has been assimilated to post Christianity and demon worhship, most of its remaining Churches are museums.
Calvin followed mortal logic too far, and most Calvinists declined to follow him all the way. But the precedent for reinventing Christianity into post Christianity was set by various Calvinist doctrines, and under cathedral pressure, Calvinists hierarchies walked those paths into destinations, that ended in their congregations quietly vanishing. Those paths were, for the most part, less logical and more wicked than those of Calvin himself, and ended in dead end destinations as foolish, even more heretical, and far more wicked than Calvin himself.
Calvinism was just rule by self-appointed elites who had deemed themselves predestined for Heaven…very similar to current communism/fascism..
That’s interesting, in that I find that the current “Reformed” churches do much better at resisting the prog rot than any other denomination.
From personal experience at multiple Reformed churches, the liturgy almost always includes the Nicene Creed or similar, which would seem to pass the demon worshipper test.
Most are multi-gen with plenty of kids running around, so they’re not rotting like mainline denominations.
And the pastors always have 3+ kids. RC Sproul, John Macarthur, and Doug Wilson (Dalrock’s favorite punching bag) all have a 10+ grandkids. That passes the “competent father with a well-behaved family” test.
Yes, they’re blue-pilled compared to historical Christians, but they’re a ton better than any other denomination I’ve come across. Not sure why.
Any Church that regularly recites the Nicene creed is protected against entryism by demon worshipers, Socinians, and post Christians.
Entryist attack has been under way for a long time, and the Apostles creed stopped working against entryists, because once the Christian Church had money and power, clever people came up with mental gymnastics to get around it.
The Nicene creed stopped that, and it is still stopping it. But you need to apply it regularly and liberally.
More recently, protestant reformation, people came up with a lot more clever mental gymnastics, the nicene creed lost effectiveness, and the shill tests became unbearably long (as for example the thirty nine articles) but with Christianity out of power, all that cleverness has been forgotten, and as I said before, theology has become wonderfully simpler. Nicene creed works fine now.
Just about every Catholic church regularly recites the Nicene creed as far as I know. What does this mean for the Catholic Church?
When I attend a Roman Catholic Church, I do not hear it recited. Possibly the priest would catch on fire.
Hmmm…maybe it was just the one I attended a while ago. I will attend the one near me, a different church, and report back.
At every Catholic Mass, whether Novus Ordo or TLM, the Nicene Creed is recited right after the homily following the Gospel reading. I wish it kept out heretics, but it doesn’t.
The Nicene Creed is spoken in the Mass, in both the old and the new Mass, every Sunday and some feast days.
In the new Mass, in English, this text is used: https://todayscatholic.org/the-new-translation-of-the-holy-mass-8/
In the new Mass, it is permitted to substitute the Apostles’ Creed, but as far as I’m aware this is rarely done.
Just watched the replay of the recent Sunday mass from the local Catholic Church in my area. The Apostles Creed was read after the homily following the Gospel reading, not the Nicene Creed.
At the end of the mass, an absurd and ridiculous “Prayer for Ukraine” was read clearly inferring the Ukrainians as innocent victims and the Russians as “insolent men” that should be brought to justice. This is in a red Trump voting area. It was not a Latin Mass Church (there are none close to where I live).
You have a lot more familiarity with Roman Catholic practice than I do. Do you have any direct evidence of the Pope speaking the Nicene creed, rather than Roman Catholic practices that theoretically guarantee he must have done so?
Catholic churches are really hit and miss. Some feel demonic, and you suspect that the priest would catch on fire if he got too close to the Cross. And some are actually Christian. I suspect it correlates heavily with whether or not the Nicene creed is actually read, though I can’t remember specifically.
Though entryists to the Catholic Church may be engaging in the mental gymnastics Jim mentioned
I’ve watched Pope Francis celebrate Midnight Mass on TV a couple times. Both times the Nicene Creed was recited after his homily.
The Nicene Creed is of course completely true and as authoritative as Scripture. But it’s not a good shill test for modern heretics. No doubt that men like James Martin and Stephen Colbert have spoken it thousands of times and likely believe it.
If you want to filter out todays subversives, you’d need something like an updated version of St. Pius X’s oath against modernism.
I don’t think you can omit the Nicene Creed in the Western Mass. I know some Lutherans who will say the Apostles’ Creed instead, but this is liturgically improper. The Apostles’ Creed is the Baptismal creed, the Nicene Creed is the appropriate one for the eucharist because it confesses the incarnation most clearly. I would venture to guess for any traditional Anglicans it is a law that the Nicene Creed is confessed at Eucharist, although maybe they are like Lutherans and use the Apostle’s creed. In Rome I can’t imagine it is permitted to use anything other than the Nicene Creed at every ordinary mass. Maybe you can skip it at low mass.
These are likely the Calvinists who have declined to follow Calvinism all the way to its wicked end, but that they are descended from Calvin at all would seem to be troubling.
After looking at the various evangelical/conservative Protestant American denominations, there are a few that actually preach something resembling functional Christianity as you have noted.
What’s interesting over the course of historical American Christianity is that the conservative churches were repeatedly entryed by progressive ministers leading to endless splits of conservative and liberal branches.
Look at the Presbyterians for example. The conservative faction split off during the Civil War. Then, that faction of churches eventually was entryed leading to another split off of conservatives in the 1970s.
I assume this cycle of endlessly branching off is not sustainable in the long run, but if these denominations could somehow prevent entrying of demon worshipping priests maybe they could actually last long enough for when Constantine arrives.
Isn’t the endless branching off how holiness spiraling works?
Each priest has to attain status, so they enter the priesthood and start selling out to build a following.
Shameless prostitutes every one of them.
No. If no endless branching off, there would just be one church that’s hollowed out and dead with pride flags waving everywhere like the Episcopalian and Anglican Church.
What’s your thoughts on Molinism?
When God foresaw all the potential pathways by the multitude of butterfly effects. God used as much of his Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence as possible that doesn’t involve violating True Agency.
Like a random arrow that was loosed by an Aramean that killed the king Ahab which just happened to find its way to the weakness in his armor:
29So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat king of Judah went up to Ramoth-gilead. 30And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “I will disguise myself and go into battle, but you wear your royal robes.†So the king of Israel disguised himself and went into battle.
31Now the king of Aram had ordered his thirty-two chariot commanders, “Do not fight with anyone, small or great, except the king of Israel.â€
32When the chariot commanders saw Jehoshaphat, they said, “Surely this is the king of Israel!†So they turned to fight against him, but Jehoshaphat cried out. 33And when the chariot commanders saw that he was not the king of Israel, they turned back from pursuing him.
34However, a certain man drew his bow without taking special aim, and he struck the king of Israel between the joints of his armor. So the king said to his charioteer, “Turn around and take me out of the battle, for I am badly wounded!†”
https://biblehub.com/bsb/1_kings/22.htm
Therefore those he foreknows will respond willingly under particular circumstances he predestined.
But for those whom he foreknows that will be stubbornly rebellious no matter what he does. He places in pathways of inevitable damnation.
God always wins. But the individual’s choice is what determines his Victory in Christ or Defeat on his own.
As an heir to the true Reformation, I’m not a fan of Calvin at all, but I don’t think Calvinism will ever completely die out. The Calvinistic tendency has its roots in Augustine, managed to seduce a Byzantine patriarch, and reemerges in various forms in Rome, for instance Jansenism. Whether or not one is anti-sacramental like Calvin, the relationship between will and grace is a perpetual debate in Christianity.
There is a straight line from Calvinism, through the Puritans, to Current Year leftism. Bad fruit.
This is interesting because my discord channel is based as fuck, and I have written a number of children’s stories. I’d love to get them illustrated and published, but I’m kind of stuck figuring out how to go about it. Anyone here interested in funding a few kids stories lol?
Discord is just a platform, and a really useful one, but you have to manage the channel very religiously, as it is easy to entry and destroy if there’s poor moderation.
Discord is a decentralized platform. A hostile take over by the right would not be possible without rooting out every single leftist discord moderator/admin, probably not possible without dismantlement. I want to ask for your discord channel, but I also know how easily people can be doxxed through it.
Vox Day is running a book publishing company. Contact him maybe?
https://voxday.net/
Self publishing is also a thing, but a significant part of publishing is the advertisement that publishing houses do on behalf of the book to ensure it’s financial success.
I will check out Vox, thanks.
Yeah, Discord is not a place for anonymity, their servers record literally everything. Back when i used to waste my time on HackerNews, I read a few detailed write ups on their server system and how they do what they do. It is very cool tech, but the management is completely pozzed. The safest way to run Discord is to know every person in your server. I’m not sure how interesting you’d find it, we play Risk and talk about geopolitics. I think there are 4 people on it? Unfortunately, I can’t give you a link here. It isn’t searchable and set to militant privacy settings. So, if we ever meet up in meatspace somehow, I’d text it to you.
Before Charlottesville, Discord was awesome. As it got more popular, the attraction waned. I personally think it is better than Slack. It is super amenable to family groups, like having a private facebook.
Japan used to make a lot of red-pilled animes in 90s like the original maccross and original gundam series.
Unfortunately the industry realizes they makes more money selling blue-pilled animes and black pilled stories are gaining popularities late 2010s.
I’ve tried sharing good old red-pilled animes, normies just not that interested in them.
The Japanese response to blue pilled anime is much like the Western response to Hans Soylo and the fake start wars sequels.
They don’t make money peddling the blue pill and gay.
The customers don’t like having to watch blue pill and gay.
The writers do not like being forced to write blue pill and gay.
But people are very accepting with One Piece filled with trannies, gay, and simps, even my conservative friends don’t mind.
>The writers do not like being forced to write blue pill and gay
Oda definitely enjoy drawing Mr. 2 and Ivankov.
The new gay starwars made a shitload of money. What it didn’t make bank on was toys for kids.
We live in a very debased culture and things that are evil are quite high status and thus popular once kids have been brainwashed in schools.
Discord records and tracks every single thing said on any of their servers, and polices it for wrongthink, and hands over specific evidence and user identities to the SPLC.
They openly admit that last (SPLC). The rest of it is trivially derivable from certain things that have happened.
Holy fuck this gold-backed Ruble thing.
Can you elaborate? I’ve been off comms all day…
It’s really more ruble-backed gold. Russia has said they will buy essentially unlimited gold at a significantly below-market price, and that they will require unfriendly nations to pay in rubles. Since they more or less can’t exchange dollars for rubles, the hypothesis is that at least in some cases they’ll use gold. I don’t really buy it, though — it seems to me they have an oil-backed ruble, and they will happily exchange that ruble for unlimited gold at the right price.
Here’s an excerpt from a Zeihan on Geopolitics post:
“Russia and Ukraine are key suppliers for two industrial inputs most of us really never think about: neon and palladium. Unless you’re involved in semiconductors or the manufacture of catalytic converters. And if you’re at all connected to the automobile sector, you’re already connected to both.
Neon is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, but it is remarkably rare in our atmosphere – only about 18 ppm of the air we breathe is comprised of neon. Red, tubular lighting is what many associate with neon, but the bulk of global neon production is used as a buffering agent in the excimer lasers that make semiconductor lithography possible.
The current global neon supply chain is a convoluted one, but roughly half of the highly purified neon produced in the world comes from Ukrainian suppliers. They in turn refine crude neon produced as a byproduct of Russian steelmaking…and Soviet defense planning (but more on that next week).
The majority of global palladium production goes to catalytic converters for gasoline engines. It helps scrub hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and other things we shouldn’t breathe from vehicle exhaust. Of the remaining uses, one of the most important is within semiconductors. To put it simply, palladium is used to help adhere the pins that conduct electricity on a chip.
Russia alone accounts for 25% of palladium exports.”
Things to remember:
-Zeihan is a gay
-Zeihan is an inveterate clot shot pusher
-Zeihan has been a Biden propaganda faucet the past 6-9 months
That being understood, his analysis is strangely accurate in enough categories that he’s worth reading, if only to get a bearing on what the elites are being told (he gets loads of money to give 1 hour talks to big companies). he has multiple books from ~2014 and forward chock full of predictions and analysis, so you can litmus test the nigga yourself for veracity.
I’ve been following him for a long time due to my interest in agriculture. I don’t think he has been talking to the elites that much.
He recently joked that it’s only after the Ukraine conflict that he’s been getting serious consideration, but even then I’ve noticed that he is still considered that funny soybean analyst who pays too much attention to demographics by a disturbing number of IR professionals.
He has recently been openly giving talks to military which probably says something about who values his ideas.
His analysis is very good. I highly disagree with his notion that the US has the best demographics in the world claiming it’s because Americans actually remembered to have children. That’s absolute bullshit. Natural born Americans have birth rates far bellow replacement rates. It was only due to mass immigration that the population grew. He is not so stupid to not notice that, nor is he stupid enough to not recognize the problems associated with increasing diversity of the wrong sort.
He is probably lying about the US demographic situation because he wants to talk to the elites which requires staying respectable.
Remember, he’s a gay. All reproductive sex is interchangeable and unintelligible to him.
I often wonder what he would say personally/privately about USA’s actual demographic situation, and a host of other things. I think I found him in ’16 or ’17, and was stunned an obvious progressive was not 100% against Trump.
Good analysis on where things stand in Russia.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/03/30/is-a-peace-treaty-to-end-the-russia-ukraine-war-in-sight/
>If the Russians succeed
Found the problem.
The Russians have not succeeded at a goddamned thing since Feb 24. A full third of their generals involved in the operation have had their skulls forcibly ventilated. The soldiers don’t want to be there and the inhabitants don’t want them there and the evidence is in the positions and the failure to achieve any measurable objectives whatsoever.
All this “UKRAINE IS ABOUT TO GET CRUSHED!” became provably wishful thinking a month ago, without a single event demonstrating the contrary since. Staying on that note makes you stupider and more delusional than a tranny. Stop doing that.
The civilian areas of Mariupol were recovered, and the civilian population rescued, a couple of days ago. Looks like at least one goddamned thing.
They seem to pretty popular among the inhabitants of Mariupol, though doubtless anyone bringing food and water would be popular. The locals do not remember the Azov brigade fondly, though no doubt any of them that do remember the Azov brigade fondly are shutting up.
According to at least one Mariupol local, the Azov brigade machine gunned busloads of civilians trying to escape so that they could keep them as hostages against the Russians, and we have video evidence (not from Mariupol) of them machine gunning a car of civilians trying to escape.
This attitude towards the local population implies that the Azov brigade regard the locals as Russians, shows that they think the Russians care about what happens to the locals, and that they do not care what happens to the locals, viewing them as enemies under occupation.
We also have plenty of reports, though again not from Mariupol, of regular Ukrainian troops shelling buildings occupied by civilians during their retreat, showing the same attitude to the locals as the Azov brigade.
In their retreat, at least some regular Ukrainian troops acted as if they had been occupying enemy territory and ruling a hostile enemy population.
To those still interested in covid and the vax. Portugal a highly vaccinated country is getting hit pretty badly by some kind of respiratory illness supposedly influenza A. And from i see around me we may also be having an alarming rate of heart problems.
God is not pleased with those who worship false idols.
In Croatia, percentage of hospitalized (that is, in danger of death from covid demon) is greater among vaxxed than unvaxxed for at least two weeks.
Just as I have predicted in November 2021.
Currently, 44.33% of hospitalized are unvaxxed, and 53.17% are “properly” vaxxed. The percentage of properly vaxxed is rising continuously for months.
https://www.hzjz.hr/aktualnosti/covid-19-izvjesce-hzjz-a/
(Last graph in the bottom of the page.)
That doesn’t really show much though, since the vaccinated are more overall
2 month ago my area was hit with really severe flu season. All triple vaxxed family got bed ridden for few days. Even local quarantine center got a lot of bed-ridden people for entire month.
The only one who pass the month without feeling anything >>> this guy right here.
The vax is looking increasingly like the biggest “I told you so” in history.
The mass psychosis is still going strong.
General population (including my entire family member) cannot make connection between their bed ridding illness and mass booster vaccination few weeks prior.
The “the I told you so” might need to wait few more years.
With nobody but the GAE paying attention to the sanctions, and governments abandoning the dollar, and “Biden” in general, I get the sense from reading the linked ( https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245537 ) market ticker article that the deficit spending, inflated Western monetary system is going to pop in a fairly imminent time frame. There are two ways I see that it could pop.
1. Over default where the government refused to pay and/or make good on debts. This would cause massive asset deflation as people would have no money to pay for anything.
2. Hyperinflation where all debts are paid off in play money. But since non-GAE regions won’t accept the dollar we’ll have to start making our own stuff again.
Interesting times are ahead.
Crisis is a good time for Caesar.
The crisis, as yet, continues to develop. And Caesar is nowhere visible.
Trump was the first major military leader to show understanding of Information Epoch warfare, and on January sixth, he showed he was no Caesar.
Caesar is going to be a man who understands Information Epoch warfare, and has brothers in arms.
Most likely will come from the military.
I think the Cathedral has eliminated The Military as a source for opposing leadership. That has always been their “bump in the night” fear, and since FDR great strides have been taken to cuck the general staff. So the question becomes where are they not looking for a threat?
Internal: keep friends close, keep enemies closer. So some politician, professor, or media manager could suddenly realize they’ve found God and country music all at once.
Foreign: El Chapo was a Mexican manlet with some blow and a tunnel to many Americans, but to Mestizos he was a god or a demon. I imagine the cartels, business, or even the military of Mexico could provide a personality capable of wielding a Brown army. As much as I like my own, I would learn Spanish and eat tortillas if it meant a return to traditional values and monarchical governance.
Art: it’s not an army bro, it’s a social experiment. Chill out and put down the gun… someone posted their TikTok revolution fantasy a while back. It wasn’t the best writing, but it was an interesting idea, an “influencer” crossing the strange barrier between performance and power.
These are fun ideas, but obviously the military, the gubernatorial class, or the mayoral class is the most logical source of alternative leadership if/when the Cathedral loses its grip.
There is a very good chance the military already had to threaten Ron Klain over the Polish plane transfer affair…
So the prospect of president retard and his radical commie idiot jew chief of staff may have made them find their balls.
I mean the prospect of them starting a nuclear war…
“There is a very good chance the military already had to threaten Ron Klain over the Polish plane transfer affair… may have made them find their balls.”
I’ve been thinking along these lines recently. One scenario is that Biden’s handlers continue to bumble us toward a war with a nuclear power. Key military people say, “We don’t feel like getting nuked because barking insane holiness spiraling fuckwits in the White house want gay parades in Moscow.” And then they take out everyone who matters in the Biden Administration.
Ideologically this is unpredictable because it’s a coup not based on politics but on the simple desire not to die by Russian nuke.
Also, what happens after that? Does the military declare a junta forever? Or do they go back to elections, in which case the Dems just continue cheating and nothing has been gained?
Highly unpredictable but there would be no turning back to normality after that.
If suffering from normality bias, they give up power and are later murdered. If not suffering normality bias they set up a junta and then we get a power struggle.
The optimist in me says “Either way – even if we go back to ‘elections’ – most normies would have to acknowledge that that’s BS and that we’re not in a democrcay any more.” The less optimistic guy wonders.
If anyone “steps in,” whether it is uniformed military or security services, for whatever reason, the destabilization will be systemic. This is precisely why I believe the military will never do it, not without a Trumpian Schelling Point to provide moral cover. If some soldier had assassinated Trump, he would have become an overnight superstar. Milley explicitly confessed to treason, and he was praised (still is, in fact). Blue Gov has gone to great lengths to instill a culture of “teetering on the brink” in the military-security complex, so they will always defer to “stability,” even if it means sacrificing their own children, their principles, whatever.
But the fact remains that 2020 election was a coup, so the next one will be easier, even if it is messier or unsuccesful.
Kunning, I don’t get what you’re saying here. Elaborate?
I apologize if this is too long-winded for a minor clarification.
Event planning is something that occurs for a long time before the event. Coordinating all the moving parts requires time, communication, etc, to get it all to happen. A normal person may experience a concert or conference as a day or string of days, but they are observing and participating in a foregone conclusion. Their position as observer/participant is as close to irrelevant to the process as possible without being completely disconnected. Something like a big storm could cancel the event for them, but there are still many moving parts in the background that maintain their inertia and continue to expend energy in the form of cost and disruption (by this i mean the rental equipment, travelling crew, etc.) While the attendees/participants/observers are essential to the supposed “point” of the event, in reality, they are not remotely close to being a deciding factor in the stakes of the event as a drawn out process over time.
This is how the military and security complex work as well. The uninvolved/uninitiated see cops and soldiers as these bit parts in reality, characters that show up in life’s narrative when the circumstances dictate. In reality, or the reality behind Reality, security entities move at their own speed with their own stakes and energy sources. Kind of like trees growing compared to brush growing. The people that are involved in “making things work” are a patchwork of bureaucratic functionaries and tradesmen on the lower end, and managers and generals on the upper end. The upper end defends their respective turf, the lower end perform certain services. The upper end seeks to bend perception to their advantage, the lower end strive to specialize to a point of indispensability. Both ends have a vested interest in the process continuing to roll on, just like Defcon needs to happen every year, even if it has completely ceased to perform its original purpose.
The managers at the top of the civilian side of military/security cultivate a set of perceptions that keep the general staff subservient to them. To do this, they must keep them around, but keep them cowed. This is obviously an uncomfortable situation for men that tell themselves that they are the big scary badasses that bring the hurt. To keep the “warfighters” present but controlled, a sense of “teetering on the brink” is constantly instilled through training courses, seminars, war games, disaster scenario events, etc. Laced through it all is the message that “without our brilliant civilian management, everything would fall apart and your beloved US of A would disappear!” The military side eats it up, because the alternative is too painful: “without our complicity, these bloodsucking paper pushers would be lynched.”
I’m probably doing a poor job of explaining it, and it is admittedly my constructed perception based on my personal experience. This is my assertion for why the general staff, the senior officers, and the PMCs go along with the Spooks & Suits. They are convinced that if the managerial class is toppled, only bad things will result, and they are convinced of this through generations of reinforcement by said managerial class.
These types: https://mediaequalizer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/FBI-PageStrzok.jpg
Control these types: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=US+army+general+staff&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
With stuff like this: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/crs-millennial-uprising-social-unrest-stress-test-scenario.pdf
[THAT IS A PDF LINK]
“I’m probably doing a poor job of explaining it…”
Not at all; I see what you’re saying. Thanks.
If that was the case, the military wouldn’t have told Blinken to fuck off with trying to start WWIII. The military, historically, has not been under direct control of the Cathedral, even to go as far as to back opposing armies of the State Department in Vietnam and China.
As leftist as the generals are, I think they are competent enough to understand that nuclear war with Russia is suicide which means they still are at odds with the State Department and thus the Cathedral.
Someone like a Milley fits the bill of historical precedents for a Caesar. A leftist (and even a borderline Communist) in his origins, but ultimately turns to stable structures that are not on the leading edge of left wing insanity.
Someone like a Milley fits the bill of historical precedents for a Caesar given where we are in the holiness spiral*
Covid was the lighting strike to make cattle go over the cliff.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/F3uLXSFhNBrl/
If anyone has a story or proto-script kicking around in their head or on their computer, I ask that you share it IF you want feedback. I’m not here to steal ideas, nor am i implying or promising an actual pathway to producing it. I have too many projects that are developed enough to be produced to add more to my own plate. But it is always good to see if your story stands up to an outsider perspective. It can be a fully fleshed out 90 page draft, or just a “wouldn’t it be cool if…”
A couple pointers on some filmmaking 101.
Very generally, a page of script translates to a minute of final product, so a 90 page script is a 90 minute movie, etc. If you’ve never sold a script, it would behoove you to be at or under 90 pages. This is a big factor in getting it read ( I personally think this is bollocks; a story should be as long as it should be, no more no less… but I’ve never sold a script.)
Budgeting is a skill set and trade unto itself. When you’re crafting a story, you add things, events, and props/set pieces/locations to buttress the narrative. You should be careful with this and look at the physical reality of what you’re asking producers to deliver. Space setting can be very complicated, depending on what you want to show. Props and costumes can make or break a movie. Sound design is, IMO, the single most important element because good sound design is invisible and anything less ruins a film. So if you are adding a bunch of big crowd scenes, or dialogue in a factory or on a battlefield or any hectic setting, you can add hours and thousands of dollars to the budget for a less than necessary dialogue scene. Guns are particularly easy to screw up, and bad gun play in a movie kills the suspension of disbelief. Also, jet-setting and vastly different biomes can kill a story before it has a chance.
The 3 most important words that every aspiring screenwriter seems to forget: show don’t tell. As important as dialogue is, film is a visual medium. Smart scripts shine through their action, setting, and locations. Good actors become the part in body first and mind second. This is a powerful tool that a lot of people foolishly eschew. Look at your dialogue scenes, speak the parts aloud, and think to yourself how the conversation would go between you and a person you’re very familiar with.
Complexity is not quality. A simple story told well wins every time. Remember, you’ve distilled a story from your very soul and put it on the page, but producers, EPs, and the Money are going to read the whole thing once and make a decision. If you share your script with someone, and you have to explain things not on the page, you’ve probably failed. Of course, there’s a niche for complexity, big brain concepts, and wildly complicated stories. But it is extremely hard to get a production team on board if you have no prior experience or track record. If you’ve got some big, beautiful, grandiose space war epic, find one of your subplots and make that the story. If you are successful, and the movie is successful, having a franchise in the chamber is never a bad thing.
If you have a script, you should have a 1-3 sentence summary, a single page synopsis, and an “elevator pitch” memorized (this is a ~1 minute long explanation/pitch). If you can get a working producer to build you a budget, you put all these things together in a document as well as reference pictures, similar movies that were successful, and A list actors you think would be good, or are good archetypes for your characters, and you’ve basically got a prospectus. You’d be surprised how quickly a conversation can go from the elevator to a full on meeting, so being prepared can sell you as a commodity to the producers/EPs.
Expect failure, but plan for success. The only thing worse than rejection is being unprepared after you get a shot. Don’t be the dog that catches the mailman and lets go of his pant seat because you never thought you’d catch him.
This is all just advice I’ve been given or learned. I’m sure there is more, and I’m not laboring under the delusion that my advice/perspective is worth more than the time it takes to read it.
———-
Something else that I wanted to discuss: I see a lot of hatorade/disdain for Vox. I’m almost completely unfamiliar, so I’m not saying it is unwarranted, but we as a tribe should probably be a bit less judgmental. No one is going to be perfect, and anyone trying to fight the entropy, however big or small their effort, should probably be supported. Particularly if they’re having any measure of success. If God grants me the opportunity to make movies the way I want with the people I want, they won’t be perfect. The message won’t be pure, ultra distilled red pill juice. Heck, being “markedly less pozz’d” is worthwhile IMO, as it can be a gateway drug to deeper, better things. Just demonstrating that there’s an appetite for something that isn’t progressive schlock is valuable to the effort. Tree Of Woe is putting out a comic book/graphic novel. All I’ve seen is a preview, but I hate the artwork and I despise superhero stories. But I’m not a comics guy, and I am happy he/they are doing something. Every landslide is made up of smaller rocks tumbling together. Just my .02$.
>Complexity is not quality. A simple story told well wins every time. Remember, you’ve distilled a story from your very soul and put it on the page, but producers, EPs, and the Money are going to read the whole thing once and make a decision. If you share your script with someone, and you have to explain things not on the page, you’ve probably failed. Of course, there’s a niche for complexity, big brain concepts, and wildly complicated stories. But it is extremely hard to get a production team on board if you have no prior experience or track record. If you’ve got some big, beautiful, grandiose space war epic, find one of your subplots and make that the story. If you are successful, and the movie is successful, having a franchise in the chamber is never a bad thing.
When Hidetaka Miyazaki – the producer of the soulsborne games – was young, he relates that one of his most vivid memories was the experience of reading untranslated english fantasy novels that they had in their possession.
He could not really understand a whole lot about what was going on, but what it did was create a sense of a vast ineffable world out there, while his imagination supplied all the fine details, practically inferring a story as he went along.
That experience quite evidently had a big impact on him, and recreating that kind of feeling was a fairly big aspect of the directing in his games; very little is directly spelled out, yet at the same time, you are surrounded by echos of history and happenstance, details here and there heavy with implication, as the protagonist crosses them through the progress of his journey.
Sounds fun and great. I have only half-assed ideas. Always liked the idea of a horror movie with progs as the antagonists. Like, a family moves to a progressive neighbourhood and at first they’re all welcoming and inclusive, but at the end the dad has to save his kids from being sacrificed in a gay satanic ritual. Something like that.
Hey Alf, I have a bunch of draft edits for Garden of Internet. What’s the best way to send them to you?
That story is a timeless classical set up. It works well for any in-group/out-group dichotomy, and it can work in any era with any culture for any context. If done elegantly, it could be a good response to Peele’s Get Out.
No kidding? Where do you get the time..
I’m still working through the draft myself and doing a lot of rewriting, but feel free to mail alf at garden of the internet dot com.
I was hunting for broken links in the blogroll when I realized I hadn’t read your book, so I started, but the minor grammar errors always irk me, so I just made notes while I read through it.
Email sent. I made almost no content edit suggestions, it was all grammar/format/readability/spelling notes. Bravo! I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think you’ve done a great job summarizing the Habbyhabbs of NRx. Your perspective on religion and faith was poignant for me, and you’ve done a good job at synthesizing Jimianity, no small task.
You know, I’d love to be a writer, and I’ve done my share of short stories, essays, and now 3 unfinished books, but I’ve found over time that I am much better as an editor than a writer.
I checked it out, looks great. Thank you, I’ll make the edits.
Vox is somewhat of a walking meme. With which honestly I have no issue. I do take minor issue with how Jim has reached out to Vox many times and vox has yet to even mention Jim once.
I’ve seen Vox lift stuff verbatim from the comments section here without attribution. Lengthy stuff sometimes. I still check in on his blog now and then, but it really lost the thread in late 2020 and just isn’t very interesting anymore. He’s very credulous, kind of cringey about his super-duper-high IQ, and posts dubious stuff as absolute evangelic truth much too often, but that makes him a good source sometimes if you know how to sift.
Yeah somehow that does not surprise me at all.
Vox was a “trust the plan” type ’till the very end! LOL.
I got scolded for having high hopes, but I fairly regularly said that it was late, and getting later, for those hopes to be realized.
Immediately before the 2020 election, I predicted what would happen, claiming authority both mortal and divine for that prediction, but I still held on to hope it could be retroactively fixed. And now it is apparent that attempting to retroactively fix what is coming in the next election is not going to work either.
Proactively fixing the next election would require legitimate proactive violence, likely a startlingly large amount of proactive violence, and I am just not seeing any plans to legitimize the necessary proactive violence.
I don’t foresee any Caesar coming from elections, fraudulent or legitimate. I think reactionaries should probably give up on that.
Caesar, or Napoleon, or Cromwell will come from military, like he always does which is not something we can predict. Perhaps we can identify “pre-reactionary†conditions which tend to be times of crisis.
>I got scolded for having high hopes
A lot of us had high hopes. It was a moment of true historical suspension and indeterminacy, and I still believe that a younger, less nostalgic man might have been able to make it happen. They’re not continuing and expanding the Jan. 6 tribunal just for shits and giggles. They were, and somewhat still are, nervous. And some very high up people, as they’re still shrieking about, were weighing options and drawing up plans.
Maybe one historical parallel is the 1905 vs. 1917 Russian revolutions. People are watching, studying, and making notes on the powers and weaknesses of the rulers, and the next time might not be so disorganized.
Remember of how fundamentally *effortless* it was to storm the Capitol. I know people were let in as a ploy/crafty power play, but it was a dangerous game Pelosi & co. were playing. imagine a slightly different scenario where a slightly different Dear Leader joined the Capitol stormers and ascended with them to the Speaker’s podium, was elected Speaker, led the summary impeachment and dismissal of the President and Vice President, and then suddenly the Dear Leader is Commander-in-Chief…
Had you offered such a scenario in October 2020 you would have been laughed at. The difference is now just a more resolute man and a short walk up the Capitol stairs and through the Rotunda. Lessons have been learned.
Once something is imaginable it is never very far from becoming actual. Things might seem dire now, but compare our world today to the world before Trump descended that escalator in 2015…we shall see.
> Once something is imaginable it is never very far from becoming actual. Things might seem dire now, but compare our world today to the world before Trump descended that escalator in 2015…we shall see.
Well said.
Day has amazing energy and appetite for the fray… but he slipped his leash when Trump failed to cross the Rubicon. Most of us in Our Thing were hoping that Trump would, but we knew there was no way to predict what he’d do.
Day, though, absolutely convinced himself that Trump was going to do it. When Trump didn’t, it did something to Day’s brain. Even now I don’t think he has totally recovered.
I read that post from a few months back and he did attribute the commenter but not the blog. Vox sees gammas everywhere. No dispute or debate only dropping the gamma hamma and smashing any conversation. He also went full tilt on Q anon and held on way too long. He’s dropped that schtick now.
Vox is definitely not good if you are being introduced to the alt-right or reaction for the first time. Mostly because he associates with others who deny the trinity like Owen Benjamin who now runs a literal cult and Jesse Lee Peterson a confused negro that’s good at trolling and teaches yoga (check out silent prayer). I unfortunately was first exposed to red pill ideas through these retards and for a long time bought into their right-wing version of unitarianism. Took me a long time to see through the bad theology. Many unfortunate souls will be taken to hell with them. No doubt Vox will play with his spaghetti thinking about how high IQ his bald Mexican head is on the way there.
Worrying over other people’s souls is an exploit in the Christian man’s mind that allowed much evil to fester. It is like spending too much time contemplating the Yellowstone Eruption; it is real, it is inevitable, it will be final, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Certainly, it is a waste to worry about saving all souls but I have to disagree with your point. Sounds like a mortal sin to not make the slightest effort to steer people away from what is obvious heresy that will in fact lead to the Yellowstone caldera. How many would have been saved had someone nipped Joseph Smith in the bud? Maybe they would have found some other heretical church anyway but I happen to think a significant number of souls would have been spared.
Vox’s idiosyncratic view of the Trinity puts him outside of the Christian church, sadly.
As far as the script thing: I have a story I’ve wanted to write for a long time. There was a river near where I grew up with a French name. It was named after a fur trader, (this is in the midwest), but the earliest histories of the area written by yankee pioneers, only say that the man died before any of them got there and say where he had his trading post or whatever. I envisioned trying to make up the story of the fur trader or trapper that we don’t know anything about and how not only the river but that whole region got the name from the guy that we don’t know anything about, but when I would try writing I would end up spending all my time researching French North America and never really got anywhere on writing. In college I wrote poetry, and whenever I wrote prose I would be good at painting pictures and bad at writing compelling plots. Surely somewhere there is a book that can teach you the basic structure of a five act play or a movie script, but anyway for me that’s what always happens whenever I manage to sit down to force myself to write–I start thinking of all the research I have to do before I write.
So, what’s really cool about your story, is that you have this destination to arrive at, a river and region bearing the name of a man (historical immortality), and you can make any start and pathway to get there. This is a cheesy but true thing: you can always make the story a story about making a story. So you could tell a story about a young researcher trying to pin down the genesis of the region and river, and intercut scenes of the trapper arriving, establishing his camp, and making a living trapping and trading. You could establish a juxtaposition between the trader finding a squaw to keep his hearth and home with the researcher cultivating a relationship with some fellow student who “wants kids, like, later, maybe.” The 2 subplots could portray how the modern age and the deep past both had their challenges and rewards for men willing to strike out and take/make a future. This set up makes it easy to go with a happy ending (researcher publishes an awesome book/trapper becomes a legend), an ambiguous ending (the book gets made to little fanfare, he gets an ok teaching gig, his girl moves in/ the trapper grows old and unremarkable, but some hand painted sign he makes ends up being the reason the river & region bear his name), or a sad/dark/tragic ending (the researcher’s work gets pilfered by some other grad student that also steals his girl/the trapper is murdered by some other Frenchy that tacks his own name on everything after stealing the OG trappers hard work). Each ending gives a ton of opportunities to layer in subtle message & meaning as well as using good locations shooting and period piece opportunities (people love period pieces). I honestly think there’s something interesting here. i hope you can find the time and motivation to find it.
Too many people, too many main characters, and, worst of all, too clever.
Writing about what you know (research) winds up with a story about scrambled eggs for breakfast and staring at blank screen.
I personally have had a few small adventures, and vaguely hinting at these adventures as if they could have been very big adventures goes down well with chicks, but I never thought to invent what could have happened.
The basic universal story is the quest – hero goes out, finds his place in the world. Does something worth doing, even if it is only finding the McGuffin.
I would think about an adventure I had, add explosions, a cool car, and a McGuffin (some of my adventures had a sufficient supply of bad guys, needed some explosions, did not have them. Also short on McGuffins)
Information age warfare inherently produces McGuffins. But the McGuffin is apt to be a master secret that lives only in someone’s head. He has encrypted a pile of data with a secret derived from the master secret, and probably stashed the encrypted data in the cloud where anyone can see it, but no one can read it and no one can know what it is. But if it is a strong master secret, he is apt to write it down somewhere.
And now, comes a lecture on the boring stuff that I do know – I told you writing about what you know is apt to be boring.
Efficient network penetration involves both taking advantage of software flaws (software that employs shotgun parsing) to grab control of the other guy’s program when his program is analyzing data that he has swept up from you, and social engineering attacks. You mount a pincer attack, one pincer being social engineering starting with low value enemy logon, and the other pincer IT engineering starting with a low value enemy analysis program running in a docker container doing the enemy’s analysis of your low value data that the enemy has swept up.
Which social engineering attacks are now much easier now that the NSA backdoor on Wifi logon has become widely known. You get the other guy’s logon, which is probably low value, and then use his personal data for a spearphish attack to get the information you actually want.
When NSA introduced the logon flaw, they figured that it would only be useful for people with sufficiently powerful computers and a sufficiently large pool of data, but now everyone has sufficiently powerful computers and a sufficiently large pool of data, so there has been a pile of social engineering attacks.
The low value analysis software is likely running in the heavily protected core of his network. When you have a path from the low value human login, that you control but he does not know you control, to the low value analysis software, that you control but he does not know you control, that path is likely adjacent to the crown jewels.
Network penetration is boring. But in Information Epoch warfare network penetration is likely to result in sex and explosions.
When Trump was negotiating with the Taliban:
Taliban leader:
“Why did you send me a picture of my house?”
Trump:
“Think about it.”
And, to get back on topic. Caesar will need to be a military leader who understands Information Epoch warfare. Putin being KGB, I would have expected him to be good at it. He understands the power of faith, and realizes he is at war with an enemy religion, but events in the Ukraine show lack of awareness of that war is now very very different.
Also the religion he has in his pocket is kind of crappy. Needs weaponization. Needs explosions and access to pussy. Fourteenth century Christianity was way cooler.
This is actually really interesting, because I have been trying for literal years to “meet in the middle” between h4ck3r and producers about believable hacking in movies. The classic, absolute worst portrayal I can think of is in Swordfish ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjqfbG_jqM4&ab_channel=JeremiahDansereau ). Now, I am no hackerman, but this scene just seems silly. I think a timelapse of a dude mostly sitting still, typing, and reading/scrolling as the daylight races across the wall, order in food containers grow like toadstools, and the character grows hairier and grimier would convey it better.
So, what would you recommend? I know there’s probably no single best way to do it. If you want to show someone cleaning a gun, building a structure, there are simple ways to use the visual medium to convey it without losing the viewer who may have no experience with the topic/subject. But most film folks (with the exception of DIT and some of the post-production wizzards) have absolutely no clue who computers or software work; they are almost universally Mac people.
Any examples from extant film would be appreciated, if they exist. The movie Primer is probably my favorite film for conveying believable engineering/technology that doesn’t get in the way of the story.
Real network penetration is boring, complicated and takes a long time. Your computer network crunches a long time looking for diamonds, and produces a pile of things it thinks might be diamonds, and a human has to look at a pile of things that might be diamonds, but probably are not.
The aha moment is apt to be a hash sign appearing, indicating root logon. But what do you have root logon to? Might be just the interior of a docker container that has a bash shell.
Snowden was looking at a pile of not very interesting stuff, when he found a document that should not be there – a high level administrator had fucked something up on a special top security network to which Snowden was not supposed to have access, and the system tossed the problem in Snowden’s lap to sort out. Which he proceeded to do.
The big diamond would be adequate information about NSA backdoors, for which we have only bits and pieces. They can access every vpn that has CA authority at its core, but as far as anyone knows, they cannot access wireguard. The specifics of how they access vpns is not known, but we know that they can, and I can make a good guess as to how. They have backdoors in SSH, but probably not if you disable all public key algorithms except curve25519. And I wish I could disable SHA256 and rely only on Blake, not because there is anything wrong with SHA256 in itself, but the SHA libraries smell funny.
I used to be a voice in the wilderness saying “disable everything except curve25519, and use Blake wherever you can”, but now I see this recommendation coming from more and more sources. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with most of the other encryption algorithms (with a few notorious exceptions – don’t use NIST curves) the problems are in the apis and libraries.
Putin demands access to computer networks located in Russia, and fails to appreciate that he is likely giving the NSA access. To resist network penetration, you need to have a need to know system, where the sovereign’s over mighty servants do not have access to what they should not need to know.
Why do you think that Caesar will need to be a military leader? A secret service leader also has armed men and might understand Information Epoch warfare as it is rather close to assassination of enemy leaders.
Secret Service? They are just low IQ civil service guards. There’s no precedent for that. The US military is the only thing at odds with the Cathedral with any real power, even just marginally and even if they are yesterday’s leftist.
I think the secret service detail that protects the president contains several decorated men from the military.
I might be wrong but I recall at least some of them having medals.
And keep in mind these people have access to the President and other important figures. A sort of Praetorian guard.
Are any really drawn from civilians?
Kunning, you are a paid writer?
I envisioned the trapper having been prepared to be a priest, but he goes to this place to make money or a name. He succeeds in making a name after he dies and the land passes away both from his people (the french) and his squaw’s people into the hands of people he doesn’t know, so there would be an Ozymandias theme there.
I’ve written as a part of work, like technical writing, and I’ve worked in fields that are contingent upon writing. But I have not been published, and I’ve not sold a script. Sometimes, this depresses me, but most times, the stuff I read, for work or pleasure, is uninspired and shit tier. So I just keep trying to produce content and hoping to one day get the opportunity to tell stories.
The River Story is a nice, simple setting. While I’m personally a fan of massive world building, epic dystopia, and protracted war and conquest, I think the better path is starting small, like the shooting aphorism Aim Small, Miss Small. A simple story about a young priest-in-training who discovers there’s a wide and worthy world outside the Cathedral is a story that could easily slip by the Censor with elegant storytelling. I’m also a sucker for period pieces. It is very easy to screw it up, so successful period production is a testament to skill.
If you took a time machine to January 1, 2030, constructed a detailed narrative of the key events of the 2020s, then returned to 2019 to pitch it as a movie script, the universal response would be, “Sorry, we already made The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, and they were far more plausible than this apocalyptic garbage.”
So it looks like the Russians are really abandoning the Kiev offensive for the time being.
The M-07 highway NW of Kiev, which had been taken over from day one is now open to the UKR forces. Hard to frame this as anything other than a big defeat.
Since the start of the invasion, there have been two war plans:
1) Public Russian war plan: we will take the whole Donbas and Lugansk oblast; we will destroy the military infrastructure of the Ukraine; we will take out as many Ukrainian Nazis as possible; we will force the Ukraine into neutrality.
2) Imaginary Ukrainian and Western “Russian war plan”: OMG they are trying to conquer the whole of the Ukraine and genocide the locals.
Additionally we have a larger strategic struggle, of which the Ukraine is a limited kinetic scene, not unlike Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s.
If compared to the official public Russian war plan, everything we have seen thus far is either about expanding the territories of Lugansk and Donbas, pressuring the Ukraine into accepting neutrality, destroying as much military infrastructure as possible, ferreting out Azov guys and their ilk. Within this framework thus far everything made a 100% sense.
If compared to the imaginary Russian war plan of “invading and taking over the whole of the Ukraine, taking all big cities, doing shock and awe” and so on, then of course we are witnessing one defeat after another.
I am predicting that in terms of Ukrainian territory, Russia will end up in one way or another with more than the official war plans, but will not in any way fulfill the imaginary war plans.
This strawman of RF failure is as tired and boring as a 35 year old slut with a college degree. The one “insight” of mainstream GAE commentary with any validity was the horror scenario of RF getting stuck in a forever war trying to occupy an unwilling UKR. It looks like NATO & frens believed this was a possible/likely scenario, and it has informed their strategy of response. But I don’t think Putin’s RF had any plans to subsume Ukraine. That has only been stated by GAE. If they assist the Donbas separatists in their reconquista as well as establish a land bridge to Crimea, then withdraw from the rest of UKR, they will have a victory. But I genuinely believe that this is the only tactical aim of the Special Operation, and the strategic aim was to get GAE to commit financial suicide with the sanctions panoply. If they had not decoupled their economy from GAE, would they have been able to move to a gold standard and begin establishing an alternative to SWIFT? I think the biggest indicator is whether the GAE core and periphery go into hyperinflation and financial collapse.
Whatever happened to the yellow vests? Were they an actual grassroots group in France or were they some shady types personal enforcers?
I was just discussing these guys with a new guy at church. Turns out he’s French and he moved here with his wife and children right before the covid hysteria. He told me that it’s typical for the French to burn quickly with these movements, but also that Macron would have riot police literally teeing off on these people for fun every single day.
Came across a really interesting in-depth first-person account by a victim of the tranny cult and her subsequent “detransition”: https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name
Basically she was a lonely, nerdy, boy-crazy teenage girl who got sucked into Tumblr and the tranny cult’s holiness spiral and subsequently underwent years of self-mutilation and misery before snapping out of it, fortunately before surgery.
Lots of fascinating details I had intuitively suspected but never had confirmed from someone on the inside. (They, like all good cults, do not allow you to speak to outsiders.) The woman can write, too.
The tranny cult is really the cutting edge (no pun intended) of the leftist singularity. Perfect case study in how a small, weird clique of spergy goons with overheated imaginations, can, with a dash of institutional support, ignite and bring a whole culture to the verge of incineration. Parents need to smack the shit out of their kids more, and public schools should be burnt to the ground. (They helped her get testosterone injections behind her parents’ backs. And this was years ago.)
White pill is apparently there’s a big and growing “detransitioning” movement, which I did not know. Maybe this thing can correct itself somewhat, or at least gain the right some natural allies. (They’re crazy by nature, but maybe their crazy can be channelled.) Worth a read in any case.
Teenage girls are a societies coal mine canaries.
See it irl too many times. Always makes me want to fedpost
The tyranny cult gets purged with fire come the restoration, and I would suggest a near 100% cull of the teaching staff in the K-12 system here in America. They are both evil and stupid, which is the worst combination possible. They need to die in a fire for what they have done to children.
There’s nothing more detestable the left has done to our society than this cult.
I’m glad it’s not something that is discussed or taken seriously in real life here, because I’d have nothing legal to say about it.
People need to keep this in mind in the future. Any time you find yourself saying “that’s just some little fringe vanity thing”, remember just how fringe this tranny stuff was even just a few years ago and how ever present it is now. Other progressive issues were the same (though not always on such a rapid timeline). We _all_ live on campus now.
If/when we finally do achieve some measure of power, we’re going to have to be a lot more firm than a lot of us would like to be about divergence from healthy norms. Things need to be nipped in the bud, early and brutally, and that will be hard for a lot of people (including me) to feel comfortable with, but it’s necessary.
All slopes are slippery.
You don’t need to be talibanesque about enforcing moral conformity if you are absolutely psychotic about killing leftists… being psychotic about leftists allows you to relax a lot in other areas.
Re Jim’s comment on backdoors and security:
Would it be possible in practice for an organization (maybe even a large one, like a military) to have its own intranet? Data in would be cleaned so as keep only the actual content and input over an airgap (simple USB stick?). Both hardware and software would come from the outside, but if infected wouldn’t have a way to transfer anything out.
I am not qualified to answer this question, but I’ll be damned if that stops me lol.
A big issue would be the hardware within the network topology. Just because you “air gap” everything doesn’t mean the various components cannot connect to outside points. You’d have to build pretty much everything from the basic components. Add to this, the biggest failure point of all systems are the dipshit users. They never RTFM, they never follow the rules, they always seek porn, they always try to connect their personal accounts. You could tell 100 people 3 simple rules for network sanitization, and you’ll have at least 10 that do the exact opposite of what you say. Hard to overcome the stupidity of individuals.
I’ve not even begun to implement it, but my fantasy set up is to have a mesh network for my property with a single bridge device that connects to the outside world. Not perfect, but I think it is doable. Mesh nets are such a cool thing, and there are more than a few examples of them in the wild, but I bet they are lousy with boxen running XP, and thus the computer equivalent of a gay drug addict in terms of viruses lurking in the background.
I think a lot of people would jump on an alternative internet, but it would also become a huge target the nanosecond after it became useful.
That’s how most organizations that care about security already work, with the exception that data gets cleaned through an IPS rather than carried in on a USB stick.
That makes sense. What I wonder is: how well does it scale?
Obviously can’t have one airgapped network talk to another one without the possibility of that traffic being intercepted, unless you physically run a wire between them and physically guard that wire.
https://www.infobae.com/en/2022/04/02/germany-abandons-most-covid-19-restrictions/
I’ve been enjoying reading articles like these the past few months. Everywhere the theme is similar.
Where previous governments and experts would look at any rising numbers to justify greater restrictions, now they see the rising numbers, acknowledge them, and continue to lift restrictions, or ignore them.
Meanwhile a handful of remaining covid faithful everywhere, and some opposition parties, still insist on greater measures, and desperately try to get attention, pointing at the terrible rise in cases and deaths, seemingly unable to understand what kind of madness has gotten into everyone else. How can they be sending infected people to *WORK*?
It is very enjoyable to see these people ignored, and their pleas barely acknowledged by third rate newspapers. Something I’ve wanted for a long time.
Normies in real life just feel restless now, mostly seem to have contempt for remaining restrictions, and want them to finally end.
In Italy, the first and final major European country to have severe restrictions and controls, a major milestone was hit on April 1. The covid state of emergency ended (of course a new one was opened for Ukraine, just in time) and the legislative-medical machine that controlled the country for two years was dismantled. The Technical-Scientific Committee that dictated to politicians is no more.
Passes are still required to dine indoors for long-haul transport, and indoor masks are required everywhere. The pass is still required for working non-remotely.
But that stuff expires in may, and for the rest of the year afterwards the only place a vaccination certificate will be required is hospitals and retirement homes.
Having to wait another month until almost-total freedom is still aggravating, but now it seems like this is final. In terms of restrictions we are basically back to last September, when the activities for which a pass was needed were limited to the same. Until a week ago you could not even visit a bank or a public office, never mind dine outdoors.
Still, this feels very bittersweet if anything. I’m not happy. None of those responsible were punished, a terrible precedent was set, and I am left with the overwhelming feeling that something important has been lost and will never come back. The certainty in that freedom which we took for granted has been shattered forever.
The ability to move freely and live your life normally is now a concession, not a right, and something that can be taken from you at any time, effortlessly, by insane and evil people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-30/never-had-covid-you-may-hold-key-to-beating-the-virus
On a slightly different note it’s now uncontroversial to talk about the fact that some people are naturally completely immune to covid, in all the variants that have occurred so far. I think I may be among them. I never caught it. Never been positive despite testing a decent number of times.
I mostly stayed at home during the pandemic, which certainly reduced my chances.
However, I was in close contact with someone who caught it during the very first phase in march 2020. Additionally, I’ve done several international trips between fall and last month. I took many flights, visited some six countries, in particular I travelled a lot during the peak of the very infectious omicron wave, and came in contact with many people, masked and unmasked.
I can’t be certain, but I think the chances I am immune to it are not low.
You shouldn’t call it the “pandemic”… ever.
more like plannedemic lmao
The covid conspiracy, the fauci fraud, the scamdemic, the fauci fraud, the meme flu the jesuit jaundice etc.
Agreed, words matter. I only say “lockdown” (or “curfew” when talking about nightly curfews) since that’s the phenomenon we actually experienced.
There is a worrying narrative that I’ve seen proposed by a small number of people on the right.
I’d call it a shill narrative, and a memetic dead end, but among those who perpetuate this there are also some people who I know aren’t shills.
The idea being that the whole fight between the NATO/Harvard and Russia is a farce, meant to distract people and justify taking greater power against their citizens, as happens during war.
Meaning, Putin is just one of *them*, citing his WEF affiliations and how the cathedral helped him gain control of Russia originally.
This narrative draws on the truth, which I and others here have pointed out, that Putin is hardly our reactionary true believer hero.
It would be good for GAE if we believed this, since we’d present no threat to them.
It’s kind of like Qanon in reverse, since it amounts to believing that everything is really fine for NATO, that this massive failure of theirs is really just planned, and they have everything under control.
Instead, what they are really worried about, is the possibility of Russia funding a revolt in the west.
Did Russia and China approve the Pfizer VAIDS stack paxlovid?
What if I told you President Xi was sent down to the farmland of an Iowa University?
I’ve seen that rumor too. I wonder what the Venn Diagram of People Who Think Putin is a Cathedral Plant and People Who Fell For Coronahoax And Are Now Embarrassed look like. Putin is no messiah, and claiming as much is only excusable for men going into combat with little hope of survival (the soon-to-be dead deserve fantastical motivation). But Russia was not invented by the Communists. The KGB was, but it succeeded the Okrana, which was derived from older forms of hard men doing unspeakable things. If you game it out, how is the skirt of the tranny GAE soft power being lifted and mocked helpful to them? Putin didn’t invade UKR, he created the circumstances to justify a hard decoupling of Russian society and economy from the West. Yes, NATO bases were a pressing issue, but they were symptoms of a bigger problem.
The scarier fear I have is the fucking Chinks backstabbing RF. China is not friendly to competitors with land borders. If they annihilate GAE, then backstab Russia, the future of whites is bleak beyond words.
The worst future would be one where china supports a hard-left rebellion in the west and succeeds. They could also backstab Russia while doing so.
This is definitely possible but I’m not sure how interested China is in actually controlling other countries this way. They seem to be more inward focused if anything.
>I wonder what the Venn Diagram of People Who Think Putin is a Cathedral Plant and People Who Fell For Coronahoax And Are Now Embarrassed look like
I’m not sure. Part of the argument against Putin is that he didn’t push back against vaccines
And while that is a disappointment, it doesn’t surprise me that much personally. Still, I would’ve bet on him opposing vaccine mandates rather than supporting them.
I don’t think it’s proof he takes orders from Harvard at all.
Funding a revolt without leaders is just silly.
They take greater powers against citizens everyday no mater what. If anything the war is making them look bad by pointing how the things they accuse Putin of doing they do themselves to their own people.
[…] Jim looks at sanctions, and fiat versus cryptocurrency. […]
Is there any way to look up comments on this blog? There was a fascinating discussion on testosterone, balding and body types a while back that I would like to look back at.