Jul 11, 2023·edited Jul 11, 2023Liked by John Carter
Good take and it reminds me of my own naïveté about influencers. I used to take them at face value, without considering that they might have ulterior motives. Perhaps this was because I was GenX, and grew up before the Internet?
It wasn't until much later I figured out how fake some of them are, you know the big names on the right on twitter and other social media networks. These people get paid behind the scenes to keep people inside of a certain ideological frame. Sometimes they get paid for pushing products or whatever, and never disclose this to their followers.
Ryan what's his name was getting 15K per month to push crap by some company or org. But being naive I did not realize this went on until I finally found some articles detailing it. These days I am utterly cynical and simply assume the big influencers are either lying or being paid off to say whatever.
Some of them can do some good, but you can never trust them completely. There is still much that goes on behind the scenes that their followers never get to see. So take everything they say with a huge grain of salt, and remember that their bottom line is what most of them are most concerned with, not your health and well being.
Very true. Of course, we had our professional influencers back in the day too: they were called "self-help" gurus and appeared regularly on daytime talk shows and late-night informercials to hock their magical seminars and books. Of course, young men were not the core demographic they pitched their wares to. (Reminds me of the scene in Donnie Darko where he confronts the self-help guru giving a pep talk to the school -- that's probably the reaction most young men would have had back then to those guys.) Probably the pickup artist community was where that changed; some of the guys who figured out how to manipulate women into bed realized, "Hey, instead of making fun of the nerds for not getting any pussy, I can pretend to be their friend and get them to pay me big money and treat me like a rock start to 'teach them' my secrets!" Andrew Tate was to young men what Tony Robbins was to middle-aged wannabe girlbosses.
"Good take and it reminds me of my own naïveté about influencers. I used to take them at face value, without considering that they might have ulterior motives. "
I have found an enormous amount of positivity online, and perhaps the best thing about the internet is that it can give you reassurance that no matter how out there you think you are, there's someone else who sees things the same way. This is also the worst thing about the internet.
My biggest concern about influencers in that regard is that the internet functions sort of like a pitcher plant. So long as the bug stays near the edge it can get something worthwhile, but move too close to the source of the nectar and you get consumed. I think of so many people out there who are like Tate- 90% great advice, will absolutely improve your life if you embrace it etc., but the remaining 10% is pimping, steroids, pyramid schemes, shilling, and secret backers. I think of the internet the way the Israelites thought of the Philistines: the enemy, but ok to visit to sharpen your knives.
I think the key thing is cultivating a sense of discernment in the real world before diving into the internet, especially for the young. The same kid who would absorb the message of Golden One may just as well find Dylan Mulvany appealing under the wrong circumstances. I work with young men and I can tell you that they don't so much internalize Tate's message as wish to be him, pimping and all. It's the image they've absorbed, not the reality of the hard work he and those like him undoubtedly put in to gain what they have. They want shortcuts and quick results; I can't even count the number of 16-18 year old boys I've had to talk to about not getting on gear, and some of them have already started. Body image problems among young men are a vastly overlooked issue and many of them have no idea what a well-developed but natural physique should look like, or how hard it is to get one.
On the other side I hate the thought of good people with a positive message finding out once they're too deep in that they've tied their fortunes to something they don't really control. By way of disclaimer, I have found nothing but support on Substack, and the exchanges and feedback I've gotten here have both improved me and given me confidence as a writer. I hope we can all continue to build something worthwhile here, hold each other to the highest expectations, and never forget that we can be a force for good in the world.
Discernment is absolutely essential, especially in an environment where 9/10 of a great message can be the candy coating for the 1/10 poison. I think as time goes on we get better at that, both individually and collectively. But it's an arms race: we get better at sniffing bullshit, and bullshit gets better at hiding its smell.
Tbh I'd rather those young guys model the pimp, gear and all, than the tranny. Ideal, no, not even slightly. But if I had to choose ... In any case, it's good they have you there to talk sense to them. Too many don't even have that one guy in their lives who gets it.
I agree that being a pimp is better than being a tranny; after all, you can stop being a pimp anytime and walk away with whatever life lessons you got along the way. Ceasing to be a tranny means regenerating body parts, which unless you're the Lizard, probably isn't happening.
There's such a yawning gap between the number of young men who need guidance and the number of older men willing and able to offer it. I plan to write in the near future about how private schools especially are an overlooked missionary field for RW thinkers (normiecons have a decent presence, but I'm the only one with Revolt Against the Modern World and Man's World Digest on my reading desk in class.
I am not any kind of propagandist. I also keep a range of materials showcasing other worldviews. I just make sure to offer a broader spectrum of thought than most. I think it's important to know as much about your enemy's views as your own. They don't get Evola and co. instead of the normal fare, but in addition. I also never directly mention my own beliefs qua my beliefs. When they ask about some political issue, I tell them, here is why X believes this, and why Y thinks they are wrong.
The important thing is to give them what anyone else would give them plus more, and the more has real significance because it stands out from what they know from their previous school experience as normal. I let them ask the questions, and make it known that there are answers they may not have previously considered.
"It's the image they've absorbed, not the reality of the hard work he and those like him undoubtedly put in to gain what they have. They want shortcuts and quick results..."
Truth. Absolutely truth, even.
Seen it so often as a teacher, the hollow kids chasing the next fix psycho-sociologically speaking. A kick, a fix, a rush of anything at all from drugs to online gaming to a special interest to give them some meaning and belonging. Almost always from single mothers and/or divorced parents. Often a semi-absent father with a criminal record but idolised and idealise by the kid. No extended family to support them or step in, just us teachers and coaches being unwilling substitutes for parents - at best, their peer group of hellions and gangers filling that need at worst.
A well-developed natural physique must be grounded during childhood: physical exercise and physical play, the rough-and-tumble that was normal until the 1990s and the proliferation of gaming consoles and internet. Perhaps each school-day - from 1st grade - should start with 60 minutes of exercise, playing sportsball or something like that?
I plan to write an essay about something I briefly mentioned in an earlier piece of mine, "The Managerial Games," concerning the PE programs that came out of JFK's push for national physical fitness (he thought the kids were too fat in 1960!) La Sierra High School had a calisthenics-based program that made national news at the time. I'll talk more about it in my essay, but the results speak for themselves:
This is a trailer for a documentary featuring the program.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Carter
🗨 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Now for a fun exercise: substitute interwebz for each & every instance of clock-word (and the tense to present) 🤸
It’s funny, because a few weeks ago I wanted to see what the credentialed classes had to say about The Golden Lion after his Instagram account was vaporized. I found an article accusing him of being literal Hitler and a menace to society because, and I shit you not, he encouraged young men to lift weights, improve their physical condition, read one article a day, improve their minds by reading books, eat healthier foods, and go outside to connect with nature.
He commits one of the cardinal sins of a modern-day swedish man: he takes credit and glory for his own achievements, instead of blaming (yes, blaming) them on luck or making excuses for having the temerity to be succesful.
Jante (invented by danes and norwegians) is merciless and sadly a strong undercurrent culturally speaking; it takes a lot to free oneself from it.
Jante's Law would have been entirely foreign to the Vikings. I've sometimes wondered if the adventurous blood all left during the Viking Age, and Jante's Law arose as a consequence of the prevailing character of those who stayed behind.
Nah, it's absent until the 19th century - then, with the onset of urbanisation, industrialisation and forced modernisation of society coupled with the anomie and alienation inherent in capitalism (since it is utterly nihilistic) brought it forth first among the urban middle classes, the bourgeoisie to use the best-known term.
Especially the bourgeoise of the smaller towns, the people used to being on the top sudenly displaced by their truly urban equivalents; used to being the biggest fish in a small pond, their cultural-emotional response brought about Jante to ensure any remaining people didn't challenge them. Better the Big Man owning the mill in a city of 2 000 than just another business-owner among thousands in a city of 1 000 000, sort of.
I'm thinking the US and the other colonies of Britain never experience something like that, simply because industrialisation came earlier in the anglo-sphere and the colonies largel adopted the mores of the parent nation, whereas here industrialisation didn't kick off for real until around 1800-1850 but then it did so with a vengeance instead, condensing the slow process into a few decades.
It is defiitely a trait almost absent among the real working class (using the job in question as the defining trait, not the income level) and the real upper class (the descendents of the old nobility).
Possibly it was made possible due to the natural humility inherent in an originally very stoic and laconic culture after we spent the 1700s losing virtually half of our territory due to mismanagement by the nobility.
If the attempts at unification of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland had succeeded... sigh. But no, all the leadership of the respective nations were far happier being the biggest in their respective ponds, than daring the pikes of a grander lake so to speak.
Still, Jante is slowly going away. My son's generation and the 20-somethings have little to nothing of it compared to my generation.
Actually, Canada does have something very similar to Jante's Law, although it has gone unnamed and unrecognized, even by most Canadians. Canadians are intensely suspicious of ambition. Tall poppies get cut very quickly here. You are not supposed to rise above the crabs in the bucket.
Not wholly on topic but at 55 I’ve been lifting for 40 years and it has been interesting to see gym / bro culture change from something very much odd and underground to something very mainstream and the territory of influencers. There are lots of reasons but I still find it odd. The self improvement and individual responsibility for growth and progress are elements that globohomo can’t stand.
Ironically, bodybuilding as a sport has some rather homo roots.
Back when I was a young scrawny teenager, I ordered a bodybuilding course out of a comic book. My grandmother thought the pictures in the course were rather homoerotic. I didn't understand at the time. I was just trying to be a beefy as the bullies, and be able to play sports at a reasonable level.
But boy howdy, Facebook pushes the homoerotic bodybuilder pictures on new members these days.
No. While there are plenty of non-gay bodybuilders, there are lots of gay fans and gay bodybuilders. Arnold complained about the gay fan mail. And some of the bodybuilding magazines are definitely aimed at a gay audience. Note the camera angles.
Sailor's rule of thumb for a sport: if the subjective ruling of judges determines the victor, it's going to attract women and gay men. If victory is determined by objectively measurable criteria, it's going to be more attractive hetero men. Gymnastics? Gay. American Ninja? Not gay. Similar skill sets.
Nevertheless I think the gay bodybuilder thing is a bit dated. The gay men I've actually met have all been twinks or fats. I've never actually run into one in the gym.
To be fair, the gym was a "Sport and Health Club", which had sauna and whatnot along with the machine and iron. (I had originally joined a true iron gym in an industrial part of town, but when said gym lost its lease, my membership transferred over.)
I agree that the bodybuilder as gay thing is somewhat dated. Lots of men pump iron for reasons other than winning beauty contests. Also, opportunities to build muscle doing real things have decreased, thanks to OSHA and the mechanization/centralization of farming.
A bit younger but I followed the same path and agree totally with the sentiments. I would say that when Globohomo finds a way to commodify something, they go all in. I think there's an important distinction between the gym culture's message and Globohomo's. The former starts from a position of positivity, and tells you the hard work is the point. Globohomo tells you the look is the point, and will sell you the means to get it, quickly and chemically. The former is about fitness, the latter image.
=== The former is about fitness, the latter image.
It's the difference between the _simulacrum_ of a thing, and the thing.
If the thing requires an ordeal, the VAST majority of mutts would rather buy the simulacrum.
Want 18" arms? Two choices:
(a) heavy curls for a long time; or
(b) synthol.
Mutts will choose (b), just as she-mutts will have lip-fillers and botox and fake eyelashes.
Ditto for the firehose of bullshit pumped into the cognosphere by verbalists; high-V innumeracy is the "Windows Phone" of cognition, but it's enough to fool the mutts most of the time.
Fortunately, high-V is now commodified (as 'content generators' are finding to their cost); low-level code-generation THAT ACTUALLY WORKS is probably 18 months away, at which point a bunch of Reddit-tier coders (I mean "full stack engineers") will need to arbitrage back to driving Uber or working at 7/11 - and Men of Arch will spend the next decade remediating the enterprise-level shitcode left in their wake.
Meanwhile, emacs users will be editing their configs.
Jul 11, 2023·edited Jul 11, 2023Liked by John Carter
Nice piece; life is fragile and there are no do-overs, and it can be very hard to course correct...it's very important to surround oneself with those who uplift you and not bring you down.
Re: the Tate case, it is interesting and I've been following it... It seems like they thought trouble might be coming from globohomo and converted to Islam in order to receive protection, but protection was not forthcoming and they were thrown into prison with no bail. Then they were eventually granted bail, and lo and behold, Andrew Tate goes out and tell his male followers to have sex with trannies: https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1668787330239565825 and Tristan Tate goes out and tells his followers that its declasse and racist to think globalist banking Jewish families rule the world: https://twitter.com/AFpost/status/1675722922856534016
Has a backroom deal been made, or do they hope to make one? The criminal charges are still hanging right over their heads (and the charges are dead to rights; Andrew Tate bragged on camera multiple times about all his sex trafficking crimes), they cannot travel, Islam isn't offering the protection they hoped for.
🗨 No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride... and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well... maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
"A scientific study by Kohut and Stulhofer in 2013 was unable to find a definitive correlation between porn consumption, well-being, depression, anxiety, and self-esteem."
So shut your idiot-hole, you filthy heretic. Porn must not be questioned. Science has deemed it Good.
Wow. Does this even count as a conclusion? "unable to find correlation". I design the worst research and I declare unable to find a correlation so everything's good.
This talk of joining influencer networks takes me back to the works of Robert Anton Wilson, who recommended looking at the world through several Reality Tunnels. To truly understand an idea, one must at least temporarily believe it.
But then one must step back and evaluate logically -- which hard to do if you just dwell in your own Reality Tunnel.
It's a dangerous game if you try believing certain Reality Tunnels. But done lightly, the idea is useful. I used to read Mother Jones just to keep myself honest and not become a mere spouter of libertarian talking points.
(Now that I'm turning into crotchety olde faerte who will find something to disagree with for anyone, I need this discipline less. Also, I'm belong to a movement which has a population of 1. This reduces the groupthink.)
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Carter
🗨 acceptance of a proposition is part of its very comprehension: understanding a proposition implies representing it as true. Consequently, it is not possible to suspend belief before evaluating veracity: people have no choice but to first believe any new statement they read or hear.
Jul 12, 2023·edited Jul 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
Even the very best online influencers carry with them a sinister miasma. We are not evolved for digital culture/entertainment and immersion in dematerialised experience exposes us all to dangers. Only a few of these are now apparent.
The invention of the printing press gave us the Reformation and the wars of religion, newspapers and telegraph did the same for mass politics and the news-reel and radio made totalitarianism possible.
Online culture is destabilising more people (and doing so more thoroughly) than anything in recorded history. The content is irrelevant. At best the good stuff is just extra juicy bait for the hook. The rest is mostly an inducement to madness.
Ultimately only time will enable us to see the full effect of the influencers. I suspect that it will be catastrophic. Happy to be proven wrong on this.
There is absolutely no question that there will be oceans of blood spilled as a consequence of this technology. The same is true of every new media technology. Change the media, change the mind; change the mind, change the society; and societies don't often change easily. What makes media technologies especially dangerous is that they reach down into such a fundamental level. It becomes religious. Which indeed is precisely what we see happening all around us.
Exactly. We are witnessing the commencement of transformative mass experiences that invariably result in intense violent conflict. Regardless of ideology or personal circumstance, it is terrifying. Hobbes famously wrote that he feared nothing so much as a disagreement in a crowd...what we can expect is likely to be way worse. The increasing incidence of desocialised individuals and the breakdown of the classic, defining institution for socialisation (the nuclear family) guarantees the emergence of personality types unconstrained by traditional norms...and such types are now exposed to the full force of technologies that can (indeed already are) being used to construct a sense of menace on a grand scale.
It's almost certain that the red/blue culture war is merely the first blush of what is to come. The last decade or so has been about the sides defining themselves and separating socially, emotionally, and even epistemically. That phase is largely complete. Now the economy is breaking down, political instability is increasing, geopolitical conflict is rising. The emotional tenor of the time, shared by both sides I think, is one of quiet despair and anxious anticipation ... a sense that current conditions are intolerable, and that almost anything, no matter how horrible, would be preferable. Historically this has been the soil in which great slaughters are grown.
The regime seems to be prepositioning things: accelerating the rate of mass migration as fast as possible, removing obstacles to the recruitment of illegals for policing (Illinois!), the crackdowns on the internet (Ricky Vaughan), the restrictions on firearms. The recent, utterly, perverse reaction to the murder of the children in Nashville (early grade kids at a Presbyterian school) was breathtaking in its callousness...eerily similar to the subdued reaction in Europe to the killing of Jewish pre-schoolers in Toulouse a few years back or the murders of the Catholic priest in Normandy when he was celebrating mass. Crazy shit can happen anywhere but when you see abnormal reactions (or non-reactions) on a widespread scale it is getting deadly serious. Trends like this can't go on for too long. Sooner or later the instinct for survival kicks in and after that....
All of those events are steadily normalizing violent repression of westmen amongst their ethnic and tranissary enemies. Each event that passes without reaction makes them all the bolder. Eventually, yes, they will start their bloody work in earnest. When that happens however, I suspect the gloves will come off in a big way, and the elite will discover just how stable a regime of control predicated on hypnosis really is.
Jul 13, 2023·edited Jul 13, 2023Liked by John Carter
There is also that financial bubble on which all the social tensions are basically the surface.
Whether it's the banks owning the politicians, or the fact the bottom line has become the final arbiter of our culture, so that profitability trumps quality, the social issues are very much an expression of that basic delusion.
The reason the current zeitgeist does seem to have all the moral fiber of bacteria is because it amounts to a cultural Ebola virus, dissolving all structure and order into a seething, zombified mass, where the very notion of differences and distinctions, let alone qualifying and quantifying them, is verboten.
We exist as biological structure; Bones, muscles, blood, organs, nervous system, digestive system, circulation system. The sexes are a biological binary, yin and yang, that predates the split between flora and fauna. Maturation is essential, yet it seems people are to be pressed into molds, not allowed to grow.
Some of the problems are due to those with agendas, whether wealth and power, or simply imposing beliefs and desires on everyone else. Yet a really big part of the problem is basic ignorance of how nature, this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated dynamic, of the bottom up energies interacting with the top down structures and strictures.
Heck, even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
How much are the problems in education a consequence of commodifying it, then basically leaving the inmates in control of the resulting puddle, to the point puberty has become a fascist plot?
I realized at a fairly early age that it was more about indoctrination, than enlightenment, given past the basics, I was learning more from my own reading, than school. Trade school for desk workers was how I thought of it.
Given most people don't want to step outside the niches they have found, or built, given the cost of raising questions is prohibitive, not to mention you have to be a member in good standing to be taken seriously, there currently isn't the potential for any serious group of people to really debate the basics, yet that time will eventually arrive, when all these ideologies, windows, frames, models, maps, beliefs, religions, cartels, nations, etc. really start crashing down.
What happens to the United States when the world does de-dollarize, but the markets and banks obsessively insist on more, while the politicians play cowboys and Indians in any corner of the world where they won't get the shit beat out of them?
Where we want it or not, the old world is dying and no one has any clue what the next will look like.
The future beacons to those not hiding in the past.
Jul 12, 2023·edited Jul 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
When Lord Michael Young wrote "The Rise of the Meritocracy" back in the 50s, he pointed out that elites are often brought down by the sort of intra-elite conflict you describe here. Although the credentialed influencers you describe are probably fewer in number than credentialed members of the PMC, their numbers are not small.
I mean, at the more mainstream end, Douglas Murray and I both went to Oxford. That's as credentialed as it gets.
I should have leaned further into this, and emphasized that the defectors from the credentialed class are a large part of the threat: they have the training, the documentation to back it up, and the ability to succeed in the online influence game.
Thinking more on this, the fact that the defectors tend not to emphasize their credentials can be seen as a group flex. By devaluing them, they explicitly remove the only thing of value that the competition has, while (ironically) implicitly raising the value of their own credentials, which become subtly more impressive precisely because they are treated so carelessly.
Not to have a dig, but Oxford must have become very Americanised indeed if law graduates get confused about titles. Lord Young's life peerage made him a legislator as well as a nobleman.
Helen, while on the subject of Oxford and credentials, have you come across BLUFFOCRACY by any chance? If so, I'd love to know what you have made of it. If not, it may interest you.
Understood. For my part, I was (pedantically) referring to the inaccuracy of the reference itself. Young was not "Lord Michael Young". He was "Lord Young". Inserting a Christian name changes/confuses things.
Am sorry for making a fuss. I am a disillusioned post-monarchist (but anti-republican) who remembers when imperial honours were taken deadly seriously...also contrary enough to bristle at the Americanisation of language and manners.
You have to add the first name here to avoid confusion. Toby Young, Lord Young's son, is now better known than his father, but lacks even a courtesy title. When you assume you make an ass of you and me :)
Well, I feel like an ass (and not a golden one) every time I consider how we are governed across every portion of the Anglosphere, so no harm is done.
Given Blair's 'reforms', any connection to the House of Lords no longer confers any distinction whatsoever. Tony, the embodiment of cronyism and shameless self-interest, made hereditary privilege look good by comparison.
This is a very good take on influencers versus scientists. One is of course rewarded for conforming to the narrative and being as banal as possible, while the other at least requires an audience. I've been wondering if the AI is personalizing results and tests based on any number of features they know about you as a person. I saw the nudge on Facebook over a decade ago, when I noticed that I was rewarded with likes for sexy pictures, family pictures, vacation pictures, home pictures, food pictures and pet pictures, while my more long form writing got very little attention. My articles asking questions about any number of vaccines got in most cases zero attention, which was remarkable, as I think I could have taken a picture of my toilet and still gotten a few likes. I was a bit too intellectual to be easily swayed by any political arguments. If they're all trying to kill us what kind of world can we possibly leave for our children?
Heartiste was of course deplatformed eventually, because the left cannot tolerate truth. Truth to the left is like crucifixes to vampires. It is a mortal threat to them. Fortunately, someone archived all his posts at heartiste.org, so we can still learn from him.
When I first read https://heartiste.org/ I had the recurring thought that he deserves the Nobel Prize for explaining women perfectly and provably. I still feel that way.
I enjoyed this comment of your. "The credentialed are optimized to slither up the greasy pole of the institutions by appealing to authority" That is so true.
Ironically, only those who do not avidly pursue attention will survive as an influencer of note. The rest , like yesterdays candy fad, will flare and burn out. Less is more I think for the long race. Balance in all things.
Jul 12, 2023·edited Jul 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
This is great, John. Frankly, scrolling on Twitter most of the time I can answer the question of whether I feel uplifted with a clear "no", almost regardless of the circle of influence those tweeters are part of.
Part of the reason (besides attention grabbing, outrage peddling etc.) is that these circles of influence, like nations, have borders - and they defend them mercilessly. You can see that on the "dissident right" with its obsession with mainstream conservatives, and vice-versa. And in all other groups obviously. Just as with real borders, I suppose it's important to strike a balance: on the one hand, you don't want to be colonized or subverted; on the other hand you need fresh ideas, different "thought blood", to complement the status quo, keep things moving, and eventually reach the next plateau. So it remains a duty to look for the true, the good and the beautiful in other, unexpected places as well, while at the same time remaining vigilant no nonsense peddlers be allowed to poison your heart and soul.
Another aspect to all that is that there might be the chief influencer of them all, the Highest of the High. To listen to his subtle voice, you have to occasionally shut out all of that earthy influencer noise. This, too, is a form of defense against the dopamine enslavers, no matter where they come from.
Excellent analogy - an organism, which must protect itself from infection, while also being open enough to keep its metabolism going.
That orientation towards the infinite and divine is absolutely essential to maintaining the psychic health of the network. Indeed whether such an influence is present is the decisive difference between the symbiotic and parasitic. In most of the networks, it is not present, not even thought of; and in some, it is quite consciously rejected and mocked.
Just had an idea, for what it's worth: I know you are an ecclectic reader, what if you add a category to the write wing where you occasionally put an interesting article from another "influence space", like from the more alternative hippie types, msm, etc.? Tough selective immigration policy lol. Just a thought.
I've sort of done that a bit already, eg linking Eisenstein or Josh Mitteldorf (neither of whom are particularly right wing). But yes I should do a bit more of this.
Good take and it reminds me of my own naïveté about influencers. I used to take them at face value, without considering that they might have ulterior motives. Perhaps this was because I was GenX, and grew up before the Internet?
It wasn't until much later I figured out how fake some of them are, you know the big names on the right on twitter and other social media networks. These people get paid behind the scenes to keep people inside of a certain ideological frame. Sometimes they get paid for pushing products or whatever, and never disclose this to their followers.
Ryan what's his name was getting 15K per month to push crap by some company or org. But being naive I did not realize this went on until I finally found some articles detailing it. These days I am utterly cynical and simply assume the big influencers are either lying or being paid off to say whatever.
Some of them can do some good, but you can never trust them completely. There is still much that goes on behind the scenes that their followers never get to see. So take everything they say with a huge grain of salt, and remember that their bottom line is what most of them are most concerned with, not your health and well being.
Very true. Of course, we had our professional influencers back in the day too: they were called "self-help" gurus and appeared regularly on daytime talk shows and late-night informercials to hock their magical seminars and books. Of course, young men were not the core demographic they pitched their wares to. (Reminds me of the scene in Donnie Darko where he confronts the self-help guru giving a pep talk to the school -- that's probably the reaction most young men would have had back then to those guys.) Probably the pickup artist community was where that changed; some of the guys who figured out how to manipulate women into bed realized, "Hey, instead of making fun of the nerds for not getting any pussy, I can pretend to be their friend and get them to pay me big money and treat me like a rock start to 'teach them' my secrets!" Andrew Tate was to young men what Tony Robbins was to middle-aged wannabe girlbosses.
The sociopathy of these fake grifter sales people impresses me not even one bit more than the type B cluster shit of the woke. Is anyone sane anymore?
"Good take and it reminds me of my own naïveté about influencers. I used to take them at face value, without considering that they might have ulterior motives. "
Makes me think more about dating ;)
Rolo believes that NAFO and Zanon influencers are in the same business... to create a false impression of the not-war.
Can't you tell when people are fake dude, regardless of their ideology?
I have found an enormous amount of positivity online, and perhaps the best thing about the internet is that it can give you reassurance that no matter how out there you think you are, there's someone else who sees things the same way. This is also the worst thing about the internet.
My biggest concern about influencers in that regard is that the internet functions sort of like a pitcher plant. So long as the bug stays near the edge it can get something worthwhile, but move too close to the source of the nectar and you get consumed. I think of so many people out there who are like Tate- 90% great advice, will absolutely improve your life if you embrace it etc., but the remaining 10% is pimping, steroids, pyramid schemes, shilling, and secret backers. I think of the internet the way the Israelites thought of the Philistines: the enemy, but ok to visit to sharpen your knives.
I think the key thing is cultivating a sense of discernment in the real world before diving into the internet, especially for the young. The same kid who would absorb the message of Golden One may just as well find Dylan Mulvany appealing under the wrong circumstances. I work with young men and I can tell you that they don't so much internalize Tate's message as wish to be him, pimping and all. It's the image they've absorbed, not the reality of the hard work he and those like him undoubtedly put in to gain what they have. They want shortcuts and quick results; I can't even count the number of 16-18 year old boys I've had to talk to about not getting on gear, and some of them have already started. Body image problems among young men are a vastly overlooked issue and many of them have no idea what a well-developed but natural physique should look like, or how hard it is to get one.
On the other side I hate the thought of good people with a positive message finding out once they're too deep in that they've tied their fortunes to something they don't really control. By way of disclaimer, I have found nothing but support on Substack, and the exchanges and feedback I've gotten here have both improved me and given me confidence as a writer. I hope we can all continue to build something worthwhile here, hold each other to the highest expectations, and never forget that we can be a force for good in the world.
Discernment is absolutely essential, especially in an environment where 9/10 of a great message can be the candy coating for the 1/10 poison. I think as time goes on we get better at that, both individually and collectively. But it's an arms race: we get better at sniffing bullshit, and bullshit gets better at hiding its smell.
Tbh I'd rather those young guys model the pimp, gear and all, than the tranny. Ideal, no, not even slightly. But if I had to choose ... In any case, it's good they have you there to talk sense to them. Too many don't even have that one guy in their lives who gets it.
I agree that being a pimp is better than being a tranny; after all, you can stop being a pimp anytime and walk away with whatever life lessons you got along the way. Ceasing to be a tranny means regenerating body parts, which unless you're the Lizard, probably isn't happening.
There's such a yawning gap between the number of young men who need guidance and the number of older men willing and able to offer it. I plan to write in the near future about how private schools especially are an overlooked missionary field for RW thinkers (normiecons have a decent presence, but I'm the only one with Revolt Against the Modern World and Man's World Digest on my reading desk in class.
You keep that material on your desk? Absolute champion.
I confess I've sometimes wondered about the potential to form right wing reading squads in the high schools.
I am not any kind of propagandist. I also keep a range of materials showcasing other worldviews. I just make sure to offer a broader spectrum of thought than most. I think it's important to know as much about your enemy's views as your own. They don't get Evola and co. instead of the normal fare, but in addition. I also never directly mention my own beliefs qua my beliefs. When they ask about some political issue, I tell them, here is why X believes this, and why Y thinks they are wrong.
The important thing is to give them what anyone else would give them plus more, and the more has real significance because it stands out from what they know from their previous school experience as normal. I let them ask the questions, and make it known that there are answers they may not have previously considered.
This is the way.
Godspeed ×7! 🤩
🔥💬 why X believes this, and why Y thinks they are wrong.
"It's the image they've absorbed, not the reality of the hard work he and those like him undoubtedly put in to gain what they have. They want shortcuts and quick results..."
Truth. Absolutely truth, even.
Seen it so often as a teacher, the hollow kids chasing the next fix psycho-sociologically speaking. A kick, a fix, a rush of anything at all from drugs to online gaming to a special interest to give them some meaning and belonging. Almost always from single mothers and/or divorced parents. Often a semi-absent father with a criminal record but idolised and idealise by the kid. No extended family to support them or step in, just us teachers and coaches being unwilling substitutes for parents - at best, their peer group of hellions and gangers filling that need at worst.
A well-developed natural physique must be grounded during childhood: physical exercise and physical play, the rough-and-tumble that was normal until the 1990s and the proliferation of gaming consoles and internet. Perhaps each school-day - from 1st grade - should start with 60 minutes of exercise, playing sportsball or something like that?
I plan to write an essay about something I briefly mentioned in an earlier piece of mine, "The Managerial Games," concerning the PE programs that came out of JFK's push for national physical fitness (he thought the kids were too fat in 1960!) La Sierra High School had a calisthenics-based program that made national news at the time. I'll talk more about it in my essay, but the results speak for themselves:
This is a trailer for a documentary featuring the program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fISgKl8dB3M&t=117s
This is a contemporary documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmNLwMJNak0
🗨 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Now for a fun exercise: substitute interwebz for each & every instance of clock-word (and the tense to present) 🤸
It’s funny, because a few weeks ago I wanted to see what the credentialed classes had to say about The Golden Lion after his Instagram account was vaporized. I found an article accusing him of being literal Hitler and a menace to society because, and I shit you not, he encouraged young men to lift weights, improve their physical condition, read one article a day, improve their minds by reading books, eat healthier foods, and go outside to connect with nature.
Nazis these days.
He's such a monster. To paraphrase his coethnic, how dare he.
He commits one of the cardinal sins of a modern-day swedish man: he takes credit and glory for his own achievements, instead of blaming (yes, blaming) them on luck or making excuses for having the temerity to be succesful.
Jante (invented by danes and norwegians) is merciless and sadly a strong undercurrent culturally speaking; it takes a lot to free oneself from it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante] The over-arching theme of all the Laws of Jante is:
"You are not to think you're anyone special, or that you're better than us."
Noteworthy is that Jante as a cultural trait does not show up before the onset of capitalism and industialism, quite the opposite in fact.
Jante's Law would have been entirely foreign to the Vikings. I've sometimes wondered if the adventurous blood all left during the Viking Age, and Jante's Law arose as a consequence of the prevailing character of those who stayed behind.
Nah, it's absent until the 19th century - then, with the onset of urbanisation, industrialisation and forced modernisation of society coupled with the anomie and alienation inherent in capitalism (since it is utterly nihilistic) brought it forth first among the urban middle classes, the bourgeoisie to use the best-known term.
Especially the bourgeoise of the smaller towns, the people used to being on the top sudenly displaced by their truly urban equivalents; used to being the biggest fish in a small pond, their cultural-emotional response brought about Jante to ensure any remaining people didn't challenge them. Better the Big Man owning the mill in a city of 2 000 than just another business-owner among thousands in a city of 1 000 000, sort of.
I'm thinking the US and the other colonies of Britain never experience something like that, simply because industrialisation came earlier in the anglo-sphere and the colonies largel adopted the mores of the parent nation, whereas here industrialisation didn't kick off for real until around 1800-1850 but then it did so with a vengeance instead, condensing the slow process into a few decades.
It is defiitely a trait almost absent among the real working class (using the job in question as the defining trait, not the income level) and the real upper class (the descendents of the old nobility).
Possibly it was made possible due to the natural humility inherent in an originally very stoic and laconic culture after we spent the 1700s losing virtually half of our territory due to mismanagement by the nobility.
If the attempts at unification of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland had succeeded... sigh. But no, all the leadership of the respective nations were far happier being the biggest in their respective ponds, than daring the pikes of a grander lake so to speak.
Still, Jante is slowly going away. My son's generation and the 20-somethings have little to nothing of it compared to my generation.
Actually, Canada does have something very similar to Jante's Law, although it has gone unnamed and unrecognized, even by most Canadians. Canadians are intensely suspicious of ambition. Tall poppies get cut very quickly here. You are not supposed to rise above the crabs in the bucket.
Not wholly on topic but at 55 I’ve been lifting for 40 years and it has been interesting to see gym / bro culture change from something very much odd and underground to something very mainstream and the territory of influencers. There are lots of reasons but I still find it odd. The self improvement and individual responsibility for growth and progress are elements that globohomo can’t stand.
That's precisely what makes lifting a form of spiritual resistance against the enervating influence of globohomo.
Ironically, bodybuilding as a sport has some rather homo roots.
Back when I was a young scrawny teenager, I ordered a bodybuilding course out of a comic book. My grandmother thought the pictures in the course were rather homoerotic. I didn't understand at the time. I was just trying to be a beefy as the bullies, and be able to play sports at a reasonable level.
But boy howdy, Facebook pushes the homoerotic bodybuilder pictures on new members these days.
I'm convinced the gay bodybuilder meme is a psyop, up there with the gay Greek and the dumb blonde. It's pure demoralization.
No. While there are plenty of non-gay bodybuilders, there are lots of gay fans and gay bodybuilders. Arnold complained about the gay fan mail. And some of the bodybuilding magazines are definitely aimed at a gay audience. Note the camera angles.
Sailor's rule of thumb for a sport: if the subjective ruling of judges determines the victor, it's going to attract women and gay men. If victory is determined by objectively measurable criteria, it's going to be more attractive hetero men. Gymnastics? Gay. American Ninja? Not gay. Similar skill sets.
Speed skating? Not gay.
Figure skating? Extremely gay.
Nevertheless I think the gay bodybuilder thing is a bit dated. The gay men I've actually met have all been twinks or fats. I've never actually run into one in the gym.
I have. I dropped my gym membership as a result.
To be fair, the gym was a "Sport and Health Club", which had sauna and whatnot along with the machine and iron. (I had originally joined a true iron gym in an industrial part of town, but when said gym lost its lease, my membership transferred over.)
I agree that the bodybuilder as gay thing is somewhat dated. Lots of men pump iron for reasons other than winning beauty contests. Also, opportunities to build muscle doing real things have decreased, thanks to OSHA and the mechanization/centralization of farming.
Yup. The biggest problem with pop lifting culture is its focus on "aesthetics" (external validation) rather than performance (internal validation).
Hey, doncha hoover the hilarious dumb blonde meme into psyop mix! It obvs doesn't belong 😝
Spoken like a brunette ;)
Not necessarily 😂
A bit younger but I followed the same path and agree totally with the sentiments. I would say that when Globohomo finds a way to commodify something, they go all in. I think there's an important distinction between the gym culture's message and Globohomo's. The former starts from a position of positivity, and tells you the hard work is the point. Globohomo tells you the look is the point, and will sell you the means to get it, quickly and chemically. The former is about fitness, the latter image.
+++
=== The former is about fitness, the latter image.
It's the difference between the _simulacrum_ of a thing, and the thing.
If the thing requires an ordeal, the VAST majority of mutts would rather buy the simulacrum.
Want 18" arms? Two choices:
(a) heavy curls for a long time; or
(b) synthol.
Mutts will choose (b), just as she-mutts will have lip-fillers and botox and fake eyelashes.
Ditto for the firehose of bullshit pumped into the cognosphere by verbalists; high-V innumeracy is the "Windows Phone" of cognition, but it's enough to fool the mutts most of the time.
Fortunately, high-V is now commodified (as 'content generators' are finding to their cost); low-level code-generation THAT ACTUALLY WORKS is probably 18 months away, at which point a bunch of Reddit-tier coders (I mean "full stack engineers") will need to arbitrage back to driving Uber or working at 7/11 - and Men of Arch will spend the next decade remediating the enterprise-level shitcode left in their wake.
Meanwhile, emacs users will be editing their configs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc
This guy is funny except when he makes fun of vim - at which point he jumps the shark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU
Nice piece; life is fragile and there are no do-overs, and it can be very hard to course correct...it's very important to surround oneself with those who uplift you and not bring you down.
Re: the Tate case, it is interesting and I've been following it... It seems like they thought trouble might be coming from globohomo and converted to Islam in order to receive protection, but protection was not forthcoming and they were thrown into prison with no bail. Then they were eventually granted bail, and lo and behold, Andrew Tate goes out and tell his male followers to have sex with trannies: https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1668787330239565825 and Tristan Tate goes out and tells his followers that its declasse and racist to think globalist banking Jewish families rule the world: https://twitter.com/AFpost/status/1675722922856534016
Has a backroom deal been made, or do they hope to make one? The criminal charges are still hanging right over their heads (and the charges are dead to rights; Andrew Tate bragged on camera multiple times about all his sex trafficking crimes), they cannot travel, Islam isn't offering the protection they hoped for.
Interesting...
Oh, and your first artwork in this post (your artwork is always top notch) reminded me of the Crusader Kings 3 artwork: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RVdvCSIJ1R_TRpruPtqtv3_fFAY=/0x0:2040x1360/1200x800/filters:focal(857x517:1183x843)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67356323/CK3_hero.0.jpg
That's too funny about the tranny advice. Sounds like the Tates have taken the ticket.
🗨 No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride... and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well... maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
"You should always be asking yourself, are the networks I’m participating in leaving me feeling energized or enervated?"
This should be on a billboard in every city in the world.
From RationalWiki:
"A scientific study by Kohut and Stulhofer in 2013 was unable to find a definitive correlation between porn consumption, well-being, depression, anxiety, and self-esteem."
So shut your idiot-hole, you filthy heretic. Porn must not be questioned. Science has deemed it Good.
Now get back to fapping, you filthy incels.
Wow. Does this even count as a conclusion? "unable to find correlation". I design the worst research and I declare unable to find a correlation so everything's good.
This talk of joining influencer networks takes me back to the works of Robert Anton Wilson, who recommended looking at the world through several Reality Tunnels. To truly understand an idea, one must at least temporarily believe it.
But then one must step back and evaluate logically -- which hard to do if you just dwell in your own Reality Tunnel.
It's a dangerous game if you try believing certain Reality Tunnels. But done lightly, the idea is useful. I used to read Mother Jones just to keep myself honest and not become a mere spouter of libertarian talking points.
(Now that I'm turning into crotchety olde faerte who will find something to disagree with for anyone, I need this discipline less. Also, I'm belong to a movement which has a population of 1. This reduces the groupthink.)
Wilson's reality tunnels concept was quite influential on the way I think about things.
🗨 acceptance of a proposition is part of its very comprehension: understanding a proposition implies representing it as true. Consequently, it is not possible to suspend belief before evaluating veracity: people have no choice but to first believe any new statement they read or hear.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Gilbert's experiment resolved the 400+ yo dispute between Descartes and Spinoza --> explorable.com/understanding-and-belief
--
PS Drat, forgot to confess: I'm totes gobsmacked by your resistance to groupthink 😊
Any time I am reminded of the RationalWiki it makes me feel new depths of hatred for smug atheists I didnt think possible.
Not only are they smug, they are boring. Truly the worst people.
Even the very best online influencers carry with them a sinister miasma. We are not evolved for digital culture/entertainment and immersion in dematerialised experience exposes us all to dangers. Only a few of these are now apparent.
The invention of the printing press gave us the Reformation and the wars of religion, newspapers and telegraph did the same for mass politics and the news-reel and radio made totalitarianism possible.
Online culture is destabilising more people (and doing so more thoroughly) than anything in recorded history. The content is irrelevant. At best the good stuff is just extra juicy bait for the hook. The rest is mostly an inducement to madness.
Ultimately only time will enable us to see the full effect of the influencers. I suspect that it will be catastrophic. Happy to be proven wrong on this.
There is absolutely no question that there will be oceans of blood spilled as a consequence of this technology. The same is true of every new media technology. Change the media, change the mind; change the mind, change the society; and societies don't often change easily. What makes media technologies especially dangerous is that they reach down into such a fundamental level. It becomes religious. Which indeed is precisely what we see happening all around us.
Exactly. We are witnessing the commencement of transformative mass experiences that invariably result in intense violent conflict. Regardless of ideology or personal circumstance, it is terrifying. Hobbes famously wrote that he feared nothing so much as a disagreement in a crowd...what we can expect is likely to be way worse. The increasing incidence of desocialised individuals and the breakdown of the classic, defining institution for socialisation (the nuclear family) guarantees the emergence of personality types unconstrained by traditional norms...and such types are now exposed to the full force of technologies that can (indeed already are) being used to construct a sense of menace on a grand scale.
It's almost certain that the red/blue culture war is merely the first blush of what is to come. The last decade or so has been about the sides defining themselves and separating socially, emotionally, and even epistemically. That phase is largely complete. Now the economy is breaking down, political instability is increasing, geopolitical conflict is rising. The emotional tenor of the time, shared by both sides I think, is one of quiet despair and anxious anticipation ... a sense that current conditions are intolerable, and that almost anything, no matter how horrible, would be preferable. Historically this has been the soil in which great slaughters are grown.
The regime seems to be prepositioning things: accelerating the rate of mass migration as fast as possible, removing obstacles to the recruitment of illegals for policing (Illinois!), the crackdowns on the internet (Ricky Vaughan), the restrictions on firearms. The recent, utterly, perverse reaction to the murder of the children in Nashville (early grade kids at a Presbyterian school) was breathtaking in its callousness...eerily similar to the subdued reaction in Europe to the killing of Jewish pre-schoolers in Toulouse a few years back or the murders of the Catholic priest in Normandy when he was celebrating mass. Crazy shit can happen anywhere but when you see abnormal reactions (or non-reactions) on a widespread scale it is getting deadly serious. Trends like this can't go on for too long. Sooner or later the instinct for survival kicks in and after that....
All of those events are steadily normalizing violent repression of westmen amongst their ethnic and tranissary enemies. Each event that passes without reaction makes them all the bolder. Eventually, yes, they will start their bloody work in earnest. When that happens however, I suspect the gloves will come off in a big way, and the elite will discover just how stable a regime of control predicated on hypnosis really is.
There is also that financial bubble on which all the social tensions are basically the surface.
Whether it's the banks owning the politicians, or the fact the bottom line has become the final arbiter of our culture, so that profitability trumps quality, the social issues are very much an expression of that basic delusion.
The reason the current zeitgeist does seem to have all the moral fiber of bacteria is because it amounts to a cultural Ebola virus, dissolving all structure and order into a seething, zombified mass, where the very notion of differences and distinctions, let alone qualifying and quantifying them, is verboten.
We exist as biological structure; Bones, muscles, blood, organs, nervous system, digestive system, circulation system. The sexes are a biological binary, yin and yang, that predates the split between flora and fauna. Maturation is essential, yet it seems people are to be pressed into molds, not allowed to grow.
Some of the problems are due to those with agendas, whether wealth and power, or simply imposing beliefs and desires on everyone else. Yet a really big part of the problem is basic ignorance of how nature, this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated dynamic, of the bottom up energies interacting with the top down structures and strictures.
Heck, even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
How much are the problems in education a consequence of commodifying it, then basically leaving the inmates in control of the resulting puddle, to the point puberty has become a fascist plot?
I realized at a fairly early age that it was more about indoctrination, than enlightenment, given past the basics, I was learning more from my own reading, than school. Trade school for desk workers was how I thought of it.
Given most people don't want to step outside the niches they have found, or built, given the cost of raising questions is prohibitive, not to mention you have to be a member in good standing to be taken seriously, there currently isn't the potential for any serious group of people to really debate the basics, yet that time will eventually arrive, when all these ideologies, windows, frames, models, maps, beliefs, religions, cartels, nations, etc. really start crashing down.
What happens to the United States when the world does de-dollarize, but the markets and banks obsessively insist on more, while the politicians play cowboys and Indians in any corner of the world where they won't get the shit beat out of them?
Where we want it or not, the old world is dying and no one has any clue what the next will look like.
The future beacons to those not hiding in the past.
When Lord Michael Young wrote "The Rise of the Meritocracy" back in the 50s, he pointed out that elites are often brought down by the sort of intra-elite conflict you describe here. Although the credentialed influencers you describe are probably fewer in number than credentialed members of the PMC, their numbers are not small.
I mean, at the more mainstream end, Douglas Murray and I both went to Oxford. That's as credentialed as it gets.
I should have leaned further into this, and emphasized that the defectors from the credentialed class are a large part of the threat: they have the training, the documentation to back it up, and the ability to succeed in the online influence game.
Thinking more on this, the fact that the defectors tend not to emphasize their credentials can be seen as a group flex. By devaluing them, they explicitly remove the only thing of value that the competition has, while (ironically) implicitly raising the value of their own credentials, which become subtly more impressive precisely because they are treated so carelessly.
Not to have a dig, but Oxford must have become very Americanised indeed if law graduates get confused about titles. Lord Young's life peerage made him a legislator as well as a nobleman.
Helen, while on the subject of Oxford and credentials, have you come across BLUFFOCRACY by any chance? If so, I'd love to know what you have made of it. If not, it may interest you.
https://www.amazon.com/Bluffocracy-Provocations-James-Ball/dp/1785904116
I was referring to a book he wrote, not anything he did in the Lords. He was also created a life peer after he wrote the book.
Understood. For my part, I was (pedantically) referring to the inaccuracy of the reference itself. Young was not "Lord Michael Young". He was "Lord Young". Inserting a Christian name changes/confuses things.
Am sorry for making a fuss. I am a disillusioned post-monarchist (but anti-republican) who remembers when imperial honours were taken deadly seriously...also contrary enough to bristle at the Americanisation of language and manners.
You have to add the first name here to avoid confusion. Toby Young, Lord Young's son, is now better known than his father, but lacks even a courtesy title. When you assume you make an ass of you and me :)
Well, I feel like an ass (and not a golden one) every time I consider how we are governed across every portion of the Anglosphere, so no harm is done.
Given Blair's 'reforms', any connection to the House of Lords no longer confers any distinction whatsoever. Tony, the embodiment of cronyism and shameless self-interest, made hereditary privilege look good by comparison.
It could be worse. See: the Canadian Senate.
This is a very good take on influencers versus scientists. One is of course rewarded for conforming to the narrative and being as banal as possible, while the other at least requires an audience. I've been wondering if the AI is personalizing results and tests based on any number of features they know about you as a person. I saw the nudge on Facebook over a decade ago, when I noticed that I was rewarded with likes for sexy pictures, family pictures, vacation pictures, home pictures, food pictures and pet pictures, while my more long form writing got very little attention. My articles asking questions about any number of vaccines got in most cases zero attention, which was remarkable, as I think I could have taken a picture of my toilet and still gotten a few likes. I was a bit too intellectual to be easily swayed by any political arguments. If they're all trying to kill us what kind of world can we possibly leave for our children?
"There’s no doubt in my mind that the reason the Romanian authorities went after Tate so hard was pressure from globohomo"
I first heard of globohomo from https://heartiste.org/
Heartiste was of course deplatformed eventually, because the left cannot tolerate truth. Truth to the left is like crucifixes to vampires. It is a mortal threat to them. Fortunately, someone archived all his posts at heartiste.org, so we can still learn from him.
When I first read https://heartiste.org/ I had the recurring thought that he deserves the Nobel Prize for explaining women perfectly and provably. I still feel that way.
You can also find Heartiste on Gab, where he posts under King of All Nads or something.
What?! I would love to hear from Heartiste again. Please post a url if you have it.
BTW, thanks to introducing me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin I had not heard of him.
If you head over to the Political Ponerology Substack, there are several good essays on. Turchin.
I think if you just search for King of All Nads on Gab, you can find him. I don't have a URL handy.
Thanks John. That was most interesting.
I enjoyed this comment of your. "The credentialed are optimized to slither up the greasy pole of the institutions by appealing to authority" That is so true.
Ironically, only those who do not avidly pursue attention will survive as an influencer of note. The rest , like yesterdays candy fad, will flare and burn out. Less is more I think for the long race. Balance in all things.
Bingo.
This is great, John. Frankly, scrolling on Twitter most of the time I can answer the question of whether I feel uplifted with a clear "no", almost regardless of the circle of influence those tweeters are part of.
Part of the reason (besides attention grabbing, outrage peddling etc.) is that these circles of influence, like nations, have borders - and they defend them mercilessly. You can see that on the "dissident right" with its obsession with mainstream conservatives, and vice-versa. And in all other groups obviously. Just as with real borders, I suppose it's important to strike a balance: on the one hand, you don't want to be colonized or subverted; on the other hand you need fresh ideas, different "thought blood", to complement the status quo, keep things moving, and eventually reach the next plateau. So it remains a duty to look for the true, the good and the beautiful in other, unexpected places as well, while at the same time remaining vigilant no nonsense peddlers be allowed to poison your heart and soul.
Another aspect to all that is that there might be the chief influencer of them all, the Highest of the High. To listen to his subtle voice, you have to occasionally shut out all of that earthy influencer noise. This, too, is a form of defense against the dopamine enslavers, no matter where they come from.
Excellent analogy - an organism, which must protect itself from infection, while also being open enough to keep its metabolism going.
That orientation towards the infinite and divine is absolutely essential to maintaining the psychic health of the network. Indeed whether such an influence is present is the decisive difference between the symbiotic and parasitic. In most of the networks, it is not present, not even thought of; and in some, it is quite consciously rejected and mocked.
Just had an idea, for what it's worth: I know you are an ecclectic reader, what if you add a category to the write wing where you occasionally put an interesting article from another "influence space", like from the more alternative hippie types, msm, etc.? Tough selective immigration policy lol. Just a thought.
I've sort of done that a bit already, eg linking Eisenstein or Josh Mitteldorf (neither of whom are particularly right wing). But yes I should do a bit more of this.
Right, must have missed that. Damn are there many grwat things to read these days. Then there are books...
I like books. Books are great.