Mailvox: a perspicacious analysis

RS points out how the Narrative is pushed in the media:

You’re an intelligent enough gentleman that I don’t have to hold your hand and provide a play-by-play as to exactly why and how this article is propagandistic. Suffice to say that given the political climate in the West and saying (as I do)that skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the like aren’t a problem in the West as this article assumes, It basically demonises whitey and Trump supporters.

I just want to point out something. We know of documented incidents of violence, hatred, and intolerance of SJWs, abortion-supporters, the Orwellian- Antifa, amongst others. We know how “the Left” likes to accuse anyone who disagrees with them: conservatives, nationalists, Christians.

So, with that in mind..read the article carefully. This is what I got out of it:

1. Isolation – TPTB will try to isolate individuals away from communities that provide support – whether psychologically or materially. This might be done in a simple divide-and-conquer methodology, or just by simple distraction.

2. They’ll provide some of these isolated individuals with alternate communities that feed and reinforce only the narrative they believe is socially acceptable.

3. “The narrative” – note that the “expert” references *narratives*, not truth…but stories. And they are no longer interested in persuading with truth and reason, but avenues of mind control and manipulation.

4. The planting of seeds – which I call gentle coercion. This actually begins in the news and entertainment media.  It is not..maybe coercion is the wrong word for it..perhaps subtle indoctrination.

Here’s an example: this article exists. It assumes that violent racism is a serious problem which needs to be solved, but the assumption is not explicitly described. It just provides a solution to a problem that we are expected to accept. We must submit first to the idea that this is a problem, before we can deal with the solution fairly..but if we work backwards? The game is up. It’s like the game of Jeopardy. What is the question, Alex? And we are expected to provide the question and, in that sense, delude ourselves into thinking that it was our own thoughts, that we came up with it by ourselves. Vox, does this sound right to you? It’s insidious! I love how they trot out the expert and a rabbi. It’s just another manipulation tactic. All we need is the gay guy and a bar and the joke’s on us. Oh wait, they did trot out the gay guy!

5. The love-bomb – this is indicative in their description of taking people on a roadtrip to find nice people. Oh…that person was kind to me! Therefore, illegal immigration or Islam or SJWism or Christian persecution or whatever isn’t a problem! It’s another logic inversion. Now, possibly those things aren’t a problem! But that doesn’t follow from “there are some nice Hondurans who don’t traffic children”. Yes. Obviously.

Wherever you encounter inversion, you know you are dealing with the servants of the Lie. That’s the scent of sulfur that informs you that what you’re dealing is not merely error, but evil.

Mailvox: deplatform yourself

A YouTube commenter describes how he achieved a degree of self-enlightenment

I got off Facebook in 2012-13, somewhere in there, when I found myself being emotionally and mentally overtaken by propaganda and kindergarten-politics every day all day. All I could think about and talk about(or more accurately complain about) was conspiracy theory and leftists. One day I looked at my post history and thought, “Holy shit I must be annoying.”

Was wasting my life away being concerned about shit I can’t change, posting to a bunch of dummies I barely knew, who wouldn’t care enough to even know what I was going on about. Best thing I ever did. Also got banned from worldnews reddit a few weeks ago based on subject matter. Nothing but a blessing on all fronts. Keep them spirits high people!

Or as I see it, not all battles are worth fighting. When you have a surfeit of enemies, some degree of prioritization is necessary. Focus on defeating the important ones first, avoid the battles that cannot be won for one reason or another, and ignore the anklebiters.

Corporates abandon Facebook

Arkhaven was not the first company to reject Facebook and Instagram and it will not be the last:

Popular fitness brand CrossFit has deleted its Facebook and Instagram accounts with a combined following of about 6 million, saying the platforms betrayed users’ trust after they removed a popular nutrition-oriented user group.

“Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease,” CrossFit said in a statement posted on Wednesday, referring to the Banting7DayMealPlan group that Facebook mysteriously deleted – only to reinstate it without an explanation. The group’s 1.65 million users shared their experiences and information about low-carb high-fat diets.

Once a supposedly neutral social media platform demonstrates that it is in the thought-policing business, you should not utilize it any longer. The more corporates abandon Facebook, the more its rivals will see the advantage in political and ideological neutrality.

Comics and cats

It’s a bold strategy.

IDW Publishing announced a brand new Marvel Action comic title, Captain Marvel.

“Carol Danvers’ quiet night with BFF Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman) takes a catastrophic turn when Manhattan’s bodegas are suddenly overrun by a host of angry felines! And not just any felines—Flerkens, the most terrifying, pocket-dimension-holding, tentacle-devouring kitty-look-alikes in the entire universe! Can Captain Marvel overcome the formidable foes before it’s too late?”

“I feel so privileged to help launch Captain Marvel’s solo title for Marvel Action,” says Sam Maggs. “Carol has always been my favorite super hero; I love how she’s truly come into her own, culturally, and is finally being widely-recognized as the star that she is. Being able to write for Carol is the most exciting and terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me. I can’t wait to share this arc with everyone!”

Maggs also noted the book will have lots of cats.

We’ll see how it works out for them.

Cancel your accounts

I’ll be sending out an email to all of the Arkhaven backers involved later today, but if you’ve set up an account on a certain site and have been awaiting further instructions, please cancel that account today. Last night we were informed that we would not be permitted to use the site because badthink and so forth.

This will not have any effect on the project at all, so please don’t worry about that. We have a plethora of options and will be selecting a better one next week. But in order to send a very clear message, it would be good if everyone involved canceled their account today. We do not intend any legal action at this point, as we would much rather not work with any partners who are less than entirely enthusiastic about working with us.

AG Barr will watch the watchers

We finally have an answer to that age-old philosophical question: William Barr.

President Donald Trump on Thursday granted Attorney General William Barr new powers to review and potentially release classified information related to the origins of the Russia investigation, a move aimed at accelerating Barr’s inquiry into whether U.S. officials improperly surveilled Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Trump directed the intelligence community to “quickly and fully cooperate” with Barr’s probe. The directive marked an escalation in Trump’s efforts to “investigate the investigators,” as he continues to try to undermine the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe amid mounting Democratic calls for impeachment proceedings.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that Trump is delegating to Barr the “full and complete authority” to declassify documents relating to the probe, which would ease his efforts to review the sensitive intelligence underpinnings of the investigation. Such an action could create fresh tensions within the FBI and other intelligence agencies, which have historically resisted such demands.

To watch the watchers and investigate the investigators. Next, launch The Storm.

Life in prison for Assange

That’s what U.S. Federal prosecutors are aiming for with 17 additional charges:

A federal grand jury has announced 17 additional charges under the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is currently in a UK jail awaiting an extradition hearing. The new indictment, made public on Thursday, relates to US documents WikiLeaks published in 2010, and alleges Assange revealed the names of individuals who were working with the US government, thus endangering their lives.

The new charges expand the original one-count indictment of conspiracy to hack into US government computers, announced in March, prior to Assange’s arrest in London. He faces up to 10 years in prison on each count, on top of another five from a previous indictment, if convicted.

Imagine the charges that will be faced by people who gave much more critical information to the Chinese and Israelis… oh, wait, that’s right. Nothing ever happens to them.

The imperial overreach of the corpocrats

Back in December, Ron Unz observed that sooner or later, China is very likely to strike back against the out-of-control imperial corpocracy that currently rules the USA:

Since the end of the Cold War, the American government has become increasingly delusional, regarding itself as the Supreme World Hegemon. As a result, local American courts have begun enforcing gigantic financial penalties against foreign countries and their leading corporations, and I suspect that the rest of the world is tiring of this misbehavior. Perhaps such actions can still be taken against the subservient vassal states of Europe, but by most objective measures, the size of China’s real economy surpassed that of the US several years ago and is now substantially larger, while also still having a far higher rate of growth. Our totally dishonest mainstream media regularly obscures this reality, but it remains true nonetheless.

Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and imprisoning one of its leading technology executives reminds me of a comment I made several years ago about America’s behavior under the rule of its current political elites:

Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the rabies virus. The virus may have no brain and its body-weight is probably less than one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central nervous system, the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.

Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to bite all the other animals it can reach. Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens, and poor Fido finally collapses dead in a heap.

 Normal countries like China naturally assume that other countries like the US will also behave in normal ways, and their dumbfounded shock at Ms. Meng’s seizure has surely delayed their effective response. In 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Moscow and famously engaged in a heated “kitchen debate” with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of Communism and Capitalism. What would have been the American reaction if Nixon had been immediately arrested and given a ten year Gulag sentence for “anti-Soviet agitation”?

Since a natural reaction to international hostage-taking is retaliatory international hostage-taking, the newspapers have reported that top American executives have decided to forego visits to China until the crisis is resolved. These days, General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US, and China is also the manufacturing source of nearly all our iPhones, but Tim Cook, Mary Barra, and their higher-ranking subordinates are unlikely to visit that country in the immediate future, nor would the top executives of Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and the leading Hollywood studios be willing to risk indefinite imprisonment.

And there is nary an American who would shed a tear if they were imprisoned indefinitely over there. It’s such a shame that the Meng arrest didn’t take place before Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China….

The thing with an agenda

Gregory Hood points out the creepy Deep State aspects of the strange ending of A Game of Thrones:

The political settlement that ends the series is even more implausible. “Bran the Broken” possesses magical powers of seeing events in the past, present, and future around the world. He has mostly sat around the past few seasons, occasionally making awkward comments. Nonetheless, the lords of Westeros make him king, based on a speech by Tyrion. Democracy is laughed off, but some form of elective monarchy is created. Bran’s sister Sansa declares the North should be an independent kingdom, and Bran agrees, thus ceding a huge part of his realm as his first act. Why other kingdoms don’t also immediately secede is left unexplained.

Obviously, Westeros is a world of fantasy, where magic, dragons, and giants can be found. Yet as George R. R. Martin repeatedly states, it contains a low amount of magic for a high fantasy series, and the focus is on political realism and cynical maneuvering. Naïve audiences who hadn’t read the books got the message when Ned Stark had his head chopped off. Supernatural beings only work in fiction if they operate in a context where they are comprehensible. Characters must respond in believable ways. The idea that lords with their own agendas and interests would agree to have an odd cripple with no blood connection to the ruling dynasty is absurd.

Yet this is just lazy writing and not important unless you are deeply committed to a television show. If we accept “King Bran,” what’s the real message? It’s that he represents the rule of Narrative, which is to say the rule of media, rather than the rule of tradition, heroism, or even intelligence.

Tyrion justifies the choice of Bran by saying he has the best story. “The boy who fell from a high tower and lived. He knew he’d never walk again, so he learned to fly,” he says. “He crossed beyond the Wall, a crippled boy, and became the Three-Eyed Raven.” Many online wits observed just about every other character (Jon, Arya, Sansa) had a better story.

Yet Tyrion says more than this. He argues that stories are ultimately what unite people more than armies, gold, or flags. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” he says. “Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” (He obviously hasn’t heard of online deplatforming).

Much earlier in the series, Varys posed Tyrion the question of what power really was. Varys said “power resides where men believe it resides.” Tyrion now goes further—power lies in the ability to shape belief.

If any one person has this power, it is Bran. “He is our memory, the keeper of all our stories,” says Tyrion. “The wars, weddings, births, massacres, famines. Our triumphs, our defeats, our past. Who better to lead us into the future?” This is an echo of Orwell—“Who controls the past controls the future.”

Indeed, Bran shows he doesn’t just know about events, he can shape them. Earlier in the series he said he could never be Lord of Winterfell, because he was now the Three-Eyed Raven. He wasn’t really Bran anymore.

Now however, he accepts the crown. “Why do you think I came all this way?” he says. Though he claims he doesn’t want to be king (indeed, earlier in the series he says he doesn’t really “want” anything anymore), he overrules Grey Worm’s objection to making Tyrion Hand of the King. “I’m king,” he says in justification. Bran also shows more emotion and personality after becoming king, though not much. There’s not really “one” person ruling the realm through the power of story (of narrative). However, there’s clearly something with an agenda of its own.

Bran as king doesn’t make any sense at all… except perhaps as predictive programming and rule by AI. The obvious king from a logical perspective was the Gendry the blacksmith, the bastard of Robert Baratheon and the most-legitimate claimant to the throne.

China rejects civic nationalism

If you want to know why all the smart long-term money is on China vis-a-vis its strategic struggle with the declining US global empire despite the latter’s current military superiority, it is China’s growing nationalism that is the strongest reason:

“Make China Great Again” is officially now the agenda of President Xi Jinping. Can “Make the Han Great Again” be far behind? In this interesting if somewhat academic work, Australian China scholar Carrico has examined the rising influence of traditionalist, racially based sentiments within modern China, particularly through study of the Han Clothing Movement (Hanfu yundong) and associated ideas.

At one level, the movement, established in 2001, is a curiosity, seemingly on the fringe of a society rapidly modernizing and engaging with the world. Han clothing is the symbol of a wider commitment to belief in restoration of a largely imaginary era of Han greatness and cultural purity and rejection of foreign-influenced money obsession of China today. But it has important elements in common with the officially promoted emphasis on Confucian principles, and on long held beliefs in the genetic division between Han and the rest.

Nor does this merely appeal to aging traditionalists and those who hanker after a return to traditional script and other pre-Communist aspects of the nation. The book begins with a quote from a Han Clothing Movement supporter, an IT professional based in that hub of Chinese modernism, Shenzhen:

“You can’t have nationalism without race (minzu zhuyi). That’s what we want to do: promote Han racial nationalism (Han minzu zhuyi) …. The multiracial nationalism we have now in China, with 56 races as part of a larger “Chinese race” (Zhongua minzu) is a big scam. It was imposed upon us by the Manchus, forcing us Han, the core of China from the beginning of time, into submission. All that this nationalism has done is to weaken China.  You can’t just destroy the distinction between civilization and barbarism (Hua yi zhi bian), incorporate a bunch of barbarians into our nation and then expect a strong nation. All this talk of “wealth and power” (fuqiang) is empty and meaningless without Han nationalism.”

The principal villains, from this Han perspective, are not the western powers and Japan and the one hundred years of humiliation, they are the Manchus. The dynasty may have been overthrown in 1911, but Manchu ideas, customs and (allegedly) Manchu money continue to prevail. The queue may have gone but the Manchu qipao and magua – both designed originally for horse-riders –are is still viewed as the standard Chinese traditional dress, as for example provided to delegates to the APEC Summit in China in 2015.

The Han movement’s intent is to remove all such foreign impurities, which has also to include inter-marriage with inferior foreign genes, a problem which has supposedly been enhanced by the one child policy.

While China is rejecting the Manchu legacy that was imposed upon its nation, the US is increasingly being forced to submit to its own Manchus, to such an extent that American history is being revised, American heroes are being vanished, and the 1st Amendment is under legal and political siege.