patrick.net

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/cryptocracy

It is not the politicians that we can see who coordinate the world and provide impetus to policy changes, but hidden puppet masters – human or systemic – who manipulate them from off-stage. If there is a single, unifying theme around which most of the current year’s human species can coalesce across all ideological divides, it is this: the true power is hidden. ...

Secrecy in public affairs puts people on edge. You cannot trust what you cannot verify, and you cannot verify what you cannot see. There’s a reason that the archetype of the oily vizier whispering honeyed manipulations in a credulous king’s ear is universally reviled. Whether the king is a good king or a bad king, if he’s really the king, at least you know who’s in charge; you know the rules he follows; you know the customs that bind him, the ambitions that drive him, the personality that animates him. There’s a certain trustworthiness to that. The power that hides itself behind the throne is power that cannot be trusted. ...

In the managerial state, power is deliberately opaque. We face not a single untrustworthy vizier, but armies of them, faceless bureaucrats and nondescript functionaries who camouflage themselves within the dense undergrowth of corporate org charts. Corner one of them over a decision you dislike, and they throw their hands up and say, it wasn’t me, I’m just following policy, or best practices, or mandates, or The Science, or whatever. Try to trace the origin of the policy, and you find yourself in a bewildering web of think tanks, policy institutes, committees, and so forth, none of which is willing to take direct responsibility for the policy. ...

The lockdowns are an extreme example, but really our entire system works like this. Take building codes. Wherever you live, there is a building code. It specifies in exact detail the best practices for every aspect of construction, and unless you follow it to the letter you will not be permitted to proceed with whatever project you have in mind, whether it’s erecting an apartment block or putting an extension on your deck. Where did the building code come from? It wasn’t the building inspector: he’s just enforcing it. It wasn’t the mayor or the members of the town council: they wouldn’t know where to start. No, the building code emerged from some local bureaucracy, staffed by experts, who put together its elements on the basis of things that other experts said were good things to do. You don’t know their faces or their names. You will almost never track down the specific person who put a specific requirement into the building code. It was probably decided upon in a closed committee meeting, and no one on the committee will admit direct responsibility. Indeed, the committee itself will not take direct responsibility: they were just following the best practices of other committees, modifying other building codes, in other municipalities. If you happen to disagree with some element of the building code – finding it overly restrictive, too cautious, too expensive for whatever marginal improvement in structural stability or energy efficiency it is intended to enforce – you have no way of changing it. The people on the committee weren’t voted into their positions. They don’t have to listen to the public, and therefore they don’t. Meanwhile, within their sphere of responsibility they have absolute power to enforce their diktats. Maybe you can reason with them when exceptions to the building code arise, and maybe you can’t; that’s up to them, and not to you.

That’s a fairly trivial example, albeit one with implications for the housing crisis currently afflicting much of the Anglosphere. It’s illustrative of how our entire system works. We are governed by a sentient miasma of unaccountable regulatory authorities whose arbitrary powers extend into ever more intimate aspects of our lives like the pseudopodia of some vast smothering organism. Their power is seemingly absolute, yet there is never anyone responsible.

Who decided on the health code? Workplace safety regulations? Environmental protections? The rules governing public parks and beaches? The speed limit? Where you’re allowed to park? Where you’re allowed to fish? How many categories you have to divide your garbage into? The stupid rules you have to follow when you go through an airport? More consequentially, who decided that our countries would cease to be nation-states, and would become the multicultural destinations of mass migration from the third world? Who made the call to break our economies with green energy policies? Was there a public debate? A referendum?

In principle, all of these things are meant to be voted on by legislative bodies, or decided by elected executives. In practice, it almost never works this way. Town councillors, mayors, state legislators, members of parliament, governors, prime ministers, presidents and the like are mostly just implementing whatever they’re told by expert advisory bodies. Legislative packages for new regulatory powers are dumped on their desks, they skim it, say, eh, looks good to me, vote yay if that’s the party line of the day, and it’s off to the strip clubs and golf courses. That’s assuming it even comes to a vote. In many cases, regulatory power is simply delegated directly to certain bodies, who make things up on the fly and set about enforcing them under colour of law.

Politicians in our representative democracy don’t really decide anything. They serve as a distraction. They’re leader-shaped appendages of the managerial state, dangled in front of the public in order to draw attention away from the shapeless cloud within which actual power resides. They provide brief little bursts of hope – this guy will really change things! – and when the shine inevitably comes off, they act as lightning rods for popular discontent. The relationship of elected politicians to the permanent bureaucracy is essentially that of an anglerfish’s bioluminescent lure to its giant, toothy mouth.

The entire system seems to be designed around maximization of the system’s ability to wield power, whilst diffusing responsibility such that identifying the actual source of power is nigh impossible, thereby shielding those wielding power on behalf of the system from any negative consequences of their decisions.

This obscurantist imperative shows up in the way the system’s functionaries use language. The technocratic prose deployed by the expert class is carefully scrubbed of any authorial voice. Identifying the person behind a given policy paper, scientific paper, white paper, or what have you, based on style alone, is essentially impossible. Third person passive predominates: they never say, “We have decided”, and certainly never say “I have decided”, but always “It has been decided,” as though policies are simply natural phenomena as inevitable as hurricanes, in which human agency plays no role. This reinforces the illusion that things are written, not by all-too-human scientists, but by Science; not by human journalists, but by Journalism; not by human agents, but by the Agency. It is the uninflected, lifeless, unified voice of the Borg.

The dead words with which they issue their pronouncements serve the purpose of occultation in ways beyond anonymization. It is deliberately boring, intended to cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over with disinterest. This narcotic effect stupefies the reader, makes him stop paying attention to what’s being said, and thereby defuses any opposition that might arise. It is also deliberately impenetrable: laced with euphemisms, larded with jargon, tying itself in circumlocutory knots to avoid directly saying what is being said. A poet muddies his waters to sound deep, and a squid squirts ink in the water to avoid being seen. Rather than a clear statement of intent, the reader is presented with a bewildering and lightless labyrinth hiding the hungry beast at the centre, and lulled to sleep as he tries to navigate it.

The system’s operators do everything they can to avoid direct exposure to the public, protecting themselves behind layers of automation and minor functionaries. Towards the end of the lockdowns, as patience was wearing thin and tempers were fraying, it became common for chain restaurants that still insisted on masking or other nonsense to have signs at the front admonishing customers to please treat the staff respectfully, because they were not the ones who set the policy, simply the ones who must enforce it or lose their jobs. This is intended to set up a no-win situation: the people you interact with physically did not make the decisions that outrage you, and the people making those decisions are hundreds of miles away and therefore quite beyond the reach of your outrage. It seems perverse to unload on some poor seventeen-year-old hostess who’s insisting that you must wear a mask to go to the table, but the only alternative to being a jerk (aside from just walking out) is to swallow your indignation and meekly comply. This is a core strategy of managerialism: withdraw as much decision-making power as possible from the organizational periphery, and concentrate it in a location (or, increasingly these days, a dispersed work-from-home network) that never actually has to answer to the people affected by those decisions. ...

The bureaucracies rely on complexity to bewilder and obfuscate; the secret police are able to enforce their secrecy as a matter of law. If the bureaucracies are a kind of dense fog that wraps itself around the world, the intelligence agencies are the malign predators that move within that obscuring mist.

Spies have a certain glamour about them, but I very strongly doubt that spooks are anything like James Bond in practice. I suspect most of them are the same kind of blandly uninteresting nebbishes you find populating the more mundane elements of the system. Those that aren’t are mostly just organized criminals. ...

But at the end of the day, as much as its operatives seek to conceal their humanity, all they are is human. They are as flawed and fragile as anyone else. Indeed, in many cases, when you actually see the misshapen goblins inhabiting the hidden recesses of the managerial system, it is striking what low quality humans they really are: visibly unhealthy, of middling intellect, riven by neuroses, with weak characters, deeply insecure and unhappy.

Their system of control relies largely upon a game of make-believe. They pretend that they have power, they pretend that it is justified because they are highly competent, and they pretend that they use their power in order to keep us safe, to save the planet from climate change, to fight racism, to stop a virus, or whatever. The rest of us pretend that these things are genuine concerns, pretend that those threats are adequate justification for arbitrary rule, and pretend that the people making the decisions know what they’re doing. They are powerful, and so issue mandates, and we comply; and because we comply, their mandates work, and so they are powerful.

But what if we just ... stopped complying?

Sure, people would risk fines, maybe even jail time in some cases.

But we’re already living in an open-air prison in which you need seek permission before doing anything consequential, while the administrative overburden of the managerial state has long since become a crushing financial weight. Taxes are outrageously high, but even beyond that, there’s the increase in costs due to all of the useless eaters working their bullshit jobs, sending emails back and forth, filing reports, attending meetings, and whatever other makework it is that they occupy their time with in order to ensure that as little actual work gets done as possible. How much of the workforce is currently employed by the government, or in administrative positions in the private sector? How much does it all cost? Who’s paying for it? ...

That’s the first shift in mindset that we need: from the idea that the cryptocracy is a necessary evil, to the idea that it is evil, and not necessary at all.

Following that, it’s simple: ignore them.

If no one is really responsible for anything, then no one’s really in charge. In that case no one really has any legitimate authority. So why listen to them when they tell you to do something? When they say ‘this is policy, now’ or ‘it’s written here that you have to do this’, maybe think about just, you know, disobeying.

As an example, take Ian Smith, co-owner of the Atilis Gym in New Jersey. During the 2020 lockdowns he told the governor to go fuck himself, and kept the gym open. When the cops came and locked the doors, he kicked the doors down. When he racked up $1.2 million in fines, he refused to pay; so far he’s been able to get the fines reduced by an order of magnitude in the appeals court.

There were a few other heroes like Ian Smith during the lockdowns, but if we’d had a few hundred thousand like him, there wouldn’t have been any lockdowns. There would have been no social distancing, no essential workers, no mask mandates, absolutely none of it, if people had simply refused to comply. On his own, Smith couldn’t stop it, and could be made an example of. No one wants to pay a hundred and twenty thousand dollar fine, obviously. But if he’d been party of an army? ...

Take what just happened in New Mexico. The governatrix, apropo of nothing, abruptly decided the Second Amendment didn’t exist because firearms are a public health emergency. New Mexicans responded with a very large and very public open carry display, and the state’s law enforcement announced that they would not enforce unconstitutional orders. That was it for her authority.

This basic principle of not automatically doing what you’re told, and sometimes deliberately not doing what you’re told for no other reason than that you were told to do it, would go a very long way towards reestablishing some semblance of freedom in the Western world. Use disobedience to claw back whatever personal agency and responsibility you can in your own life, train yourself not to take these people seriously, encourage others to do the same, and if enough people do this, eventually it will become so prohibitively expensive to manage the population that the strangling vines of this parasitic organism we call the managerial state can be hacked back to something manageable.

The_Deplorable says

RWSGFY says

"The guy is doubling down on his broken clock schtick hoping that something, ANYTHING he predicts comes true. So sad."

Well, Russia defeated the US and NATO in the Ukraine.

It did? That's an interesting definition of "victory". I guess if you allowed to move the goalposts at will even Megan Rapinoe team of lesbians can "win" against FC Barcelona.

They hold 50% less land then at the max occupation, their fleet is a flotilla and a ghost of its former self, now mostly based out of Crimea, the goal of "demitarization"
is further than it was at the start of the hostilities, etc.

With "victory" like that how does the defeat look like? Let me guess: kicking the enemy from 1/2 of the territory it occupied is a defeat? Denying him contol of territorues he's supposedly "annexed"? Neutering his fleet, including sinking the flagship and making the HQ into a burned-out husk? Making your enemy go hat in hand to NoKo for some ammo? What else? Effectively dismantling the grain blocade? Defeat, defeat, defeat, defeat.

Clown world indeed. 🤡

"Well, Russia defeated the US and NATO in the Ukraine."

RWSGFY says

"It did? That's an interesting definition of 'victory'."

Yes it did. That is why Russia right now controls the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. And that is why the US and Europe are urging Zelensky to surrender. The Ukraine lost over 500,000 soldiers and they are finished!

The_Deplorable says

Yes it did. That is why Russia right now controls the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. And that is why the US and Europe are urging Zelensky to surrender. The Ukraine lost over 500,000 soldiers and they are finished!

Eh? It controls parts of Eastern Ukraine and is forced to fight hard to keep it this way. Does not fully control a single oblast declared as "annexed" - not Donets, not Luhansk, not Zaporizzha and especially not Kherson. This is worse than pre-2022 because they controlled slightly smaller territory but without much active fighting. Worse situation != victory.

All of Crimea is under fire control by long-range Ukie weaponry, with IAD decimated, storage areas, bases, docks and airfields hit every week. The fleet is practically kicked out Sebastopol, the HQ is bombed out (we have a juicy thread dedicated to that poor little fleet). The Kerch bridge is only partially functioning. This is again worse than pre-2022. Worse situation != victory.

The loss of over 500,000 is a non-substantiated claim, but this is again irrelevant unless the aim of war is purely genocide. (Is it?). Besides, Soviets lost even more - some say north of 1,000,000* - so again worse situation != victory.

On the confirmed and documented military equipment losses Soviets are faring much worse (see Oryx). Which, btw, means their loss in manpower is also much worse, so maybe that 1 mil number is not that crazy if you believe in 1/2 mil on the other side. (Can't have it both ways, can we now?).

The "urging to surrender" is another fantasy. This noise has been there since the day one. Which person of consequence and power in Europe and US has "urged Zelensky to surrender"? I want names. Orban? Who else? Some jorno? Some "anonymous source"? Puhleeze. Trump? He sure didn't. And again, if somebody "urges your opponent to surrender" it doesn't mean you've won something until he actually surrenders.

*) See how easy to play this game? Cut it out.

See https://twitter.com/Yolo304741/status/1724556707097932054 4 Minutes long. The music is distracting and unnecessary but this remains a powerful message.

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/1724324713772822841 1:31 Minutes

It feels to me like AI is already running various governments, and not for our benefit.

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/11/16/billionaire-funds-the-guardian-to-tune-of-116-per-reader-of-print-edition/

Billionaire Funds the Guardian to Tune of $116 Per Reader of Print Edition

In 2021 the Guardian ran a series of adverts claiming the newspaper was “not funded by billionaires”, and “our readers’ backing gives us the independence to hold the powerful to account”. Not perhaps all the powerful. The Guardian is backed by a number of billionaire philanthropic foundations, including the European Climate Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. According to the investigative journalist Ben Pile, an additional $12 million grant from the Gates Foundation is equivalent alone to $116 for every reader of the print version.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/cryptocracy

The entire system seems to be designed around maximization of the system’s ability to wield power, whilst diffusing responsibility such that identifying the actual source of power is nigh impossible, thereby shielding those wielding power on behalf of the system from any negative consequences of their decisions.

This obscurantist imperative shows up in the way the system’s functionaries use language. The technocratic prose deployed by the expert class is carefully scrubbed of any authorial voice. Identifying the person behind a given policy paper, scientific paper, white paper, or what have you, based on style alone, is essentially impossible. Third person passive predominates: they never say, “We have decided”, and certainly never say “I have decided”, but always “It has been decided,” as though policies are simply natural phenomena as inevitable as hurricanes, in which human agency plays no role. This reinforces the illusion that things are written, not by all-too-human scientists, but by Science; not by human journalists, but by Journalism; not by human agents, but by the Agency. It is the uninflected, lifeless, unified voice of the Borg.

Legitimate signal of power shift, or more of the same..?

https://www.weforum.org/people/javier-gerardo-milei/

Context for the above if anyone wasn't aware:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/preview-argentinas-consequential-election-sunday

https://mansworldmag.online/the-populist-moment-never-happened/

Nor are these problems four-dimensional Machiavellian “chess” on the part of an actually competent shadowy “elite” that is in fact “profiting” from the disorder; there is no cynical manipulator of events… things really are that stupid, and there’s no one competent at the wheel of events. ...

And all wrecked by “economic populism” that results in crushing taxation, regulations in the name of social justice that destroy all enterprise, and ultimately really the enslavement of the good, intelligent, and talented part of the population in the service of providing goods to the dumb, dusky stupid many so that these many may vote for petty politicians invoking selfrighteous “union” language. It’s that simple. The left is right that libertarianism in Argentina would be “de facto white supremacy.” In fact they’re right about it in the United States too, except that the “dissident right” brain trust has convinced itself that the white “working class,” who are already highly taxed at the local level, would profit not from an elimination of racial legal handicaps against them and their children, as well as a lowering of their taxes—that would be Neoliberalism! Libertarianism!—but through “conservative populist socialism,” that is, taking more taxes from them and then funneling it back in the forms of “credits” or “services” after being filtered and laundered through the hands of various government employees. Who are these employees? Well, not “altright” or altlite Bannonite or “dissident conservative socialist” brain trust people as none have gone into the government bureaucracy, but Shaniquas and Chantelles. ...

Here is briefly, experience in Argentina, a few things I remember vividly: a Croatian Argentineborn businesswoman, owner of a cafe with unusually good coffee and Balkan pastries, who, prompted by warm conversation one morning, burst out crying to me over the prospects of her grandchildren in Argentina. All intelligent, highly educated, working in white collar professions, and all absolutely squeezed dry by a government that took most of their income while berating them for their “atomized” individualist identity and desires, and reminded them of their duty to give to the (helpfully beige, for moral reasons) Community and Society. All had material resources and a way of life that would be considered at best lower middle class in Europe and America, maybe not even that; all impoverished by a government that insists white collar workers are high-paid bloodsuckers who feed on the lifeblood of the Salt of the Earth working man. Every intelligent person who seeks or wants a half-good job complains about the same things in Argentina; crushing taxation, suffocating lack of opportunity, and an arrogant, partlyracially-mobilized “Working Class” that gets paid better than they do and is allowed to act with unending arrogance… bus drivers make double or three times what most white collar workers make there. The squeezing-dry of all money takes place for the sake of a “multiracial working class,” that is, a colored underclass. It is mostly the same in America and increasingly so in Europe ...

... in short, to be squeezed dry so that an obese Chantelle may gracelessly expire in a hospital after heroic efforts by inevitably low-paid medical professionals, and after a lifetime of her fattening up on corn chip. This is the cycle of the modern economy. In Argentina this Cycle has been made inescapable and all-encompassing. The high taxes provide no public services to speak of, no really common social or political life, no clean streets. ...

The insane female-protection laws of the country are another part of this story — and another benefit of decades-long “working man’s antiglobalist economic populist democracy.” To “denounce” a man is the absolute right of any woman, and without any due process a man will have his rights stripped and life destroyed by whatever denunciation, no matter how frivolous or without evidence. (To complain about such things in Dissident Right circles in America has also lately become declasse: you don’t want to be one of those boring Manosphere guys do you? What’s really important is Economic Populism and ending the rule of Global Capitalist Elites…) Thus Argentina may also be the first country where a significant percentage of the men have had to flee because of literal political persecution by militant feminism. ...

The likely future — and to a large extent already the present — of Argentina is interesting because the solution is and will be mass migration of its capable, its wealthy, and eventually soon in coming decades in general most of its beautiful, its talented, its non-dwarflike. But where will there be left to flee in the end?

https://twitter.com/MichaelWarbur17/status/1727266724138164725

Showdown As Saudi Arabia Leaders Warn US To Stop Israel Or Face Its Wrath...

"Saudi officials have strongly warned the United States that if Israel decides to launch a ground operation in Gaza, it could lead to a disastrous situation in the Middle East. The Saudis are emphasizing the potential for severe consequences and urging the US to consider the broader impact such a move might have on the already tense region.
Over the weekend, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the Armed Services Committee, was part of a delegation of 10 senators who met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdGaAQc-Zts