<context>: Old parties were architected in the age of newspapers and transitioned seamlessly into the even more information centralised and monopolistic TV age. Since Steve Jobs "oh one more thing" moment, the entire landscape of information is completely restructured.
Society has very fundamentally changed from top down single source information (TV), to poly directional highly networked flows of information (social media).
It's now pretty much impossible to control what people see and think. You can pump content as hard as you like, if people don't respond to it the algorithm buries it. Therefore we live in an age of triggering and radicalising information this is an unstoppable mathematical outcome of the foundational structure of how information now flows through society.
</context>
On that backdrop, the old parties are dead. Literally gasping dinosaurs stumbling around after the asteroid hit. They cannot and will not survive in this new environment.
The same applies to pretty much all institutions and even corporate brands. In the sense that they are fictional collective identities of legal entities. The whole concept of a corporate brand is going to die within a generation or two. Brands were an efficient way to communicate via super dense centralised pipelines that were extremely expensive to lease (half time TV commercials, etc). TV viewing figures are crashing, and even when the TV is on your attention is on your phone.
So what matters in the future?
Everything will be hyper personified, Trump personifies MAGA, Musk personifies Tesla and SpaceX, Farage personifies polite political protest, it's the Joe Roeganification of communication. Audiences want a human connection a face, a name, some tangible human who they can like. They don't want soundbites and splash screens, they want longform intimacy and trust building, smartphones offer an open platform for all personalities to broadcast themselves.
Nike marketing sort of started this snowball 50 years ago, using athletes to personify their brand, but smartphones and Zuckerberg's network hypothesis have brought it to critical mass.
What does that mean?
It means Gary's Economics podcast carries more gravitas with the British electorate than a Bank of England press release. It means Nigel Farage and his iPhone have more political gravitas than both the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the BBC combined.
Hyper personification is a relatively new phenomena, but it is only going to become stronger and stronger.
The only other dimension for 21st Century communication is audience-identity symbolism.
Because of the triggering and radicalising nature of attention maximising algorithms, audiences are becoming increasingly sensitive to the symbols of their own identity. They are becoming more and more proud and loyal to the symbols of who they perceive themselves to be.
Essentially these are things that people feel proud of. The SAS is a symbolic representation of the British people. Likewise the Quran is a powerful symbol of identity for millions of people. There are a few things (I won't list them) that are identity symbols among groups of the electorate and someone is going to figure out how to integrate these things as symbolic props to build non-contradictory electoral coalitions.
Any contradiction or paradox within an electoral coalition is pretty much irreparable in the future as there is no way to restrict the networked flow of information (LGBT for Palestine is not a sustainable coalition, as homosexuality criminalised and attracts a 10 year prison sentence in Palestine, that is not something that is going to be durable in the face of events), this likely leads to more numerous smaller natural coalitions forming. We're probably heading for a more volatile multiparty system where 4 or 5 parties challenge elections and rarely win consecutive terms.
This plays havoc with our FPTP parliamentary composition.
This will lead to even shorter term political and economic strategies, likely putting us at a structural disadvantage on the world stage as rival nations will be able to bully our perpetual succession of lame duck governments. It also means the churn of politicians in parliament will accelerate, which may be a good think as it will impose defacto terms limits via instability.
Strategically, the only hope for the UK is one of two scenarios
A) If someone somehow forms a durable 35-40% coalition.
Already there is the stalking horse of Islamists, who are on a slow and grinding path to this figure by virtual of a superior fertility rate and mass immigration, and will probably reach it some point in the medium future. So JD Vance is probably correct, there is a short window for the UK to forge a durable new electoral coalition, born of the network information age that is strong enough to exit all the ruinous historic treaties. Treaties we drafted but that have been weaponised against us, and our sclerotic contemporary political class, and actually stop the scales tipping forever against the Western liberal ideals that have been our way of life since Magna Carta.
The UK has already crested the hill on our descent into violent upheaval. You aren't allowed to say that in public places, but at private parties everyone thinks it (outside the London pimple at least).
I think Farage is almost a slam dunk for 2029, unless there is some shock even that jerks a new movement into being, I also think Farage is glaringly ill prepared for Downing Street and losing control of his schedule and may even self sabotage as the moment approaches. I think he is aware of his own super-position and is far far more comfortable outside the tent pissing in. Deep down he knows all too well that entering Number 10 will destroy his public persona, tear his life apart and cap his entire journey with a bitter ending. Farage as Kingmaker is more likely, but his own ego and superposition prevents that until the time actually comes.
B) A sort of 1990's South Africa where a deep state is architected into existence that wields strategic oversight away from the churn of front line Parliament. This is not really democracy, and there are several forms this could take, e.g. House of Lords, Supreme Court, City of London, Blair Institute's sprawling constellation of quangos, Intelligence Agencies, banking community, business sector, or maybe some group of deep pocketed capitalists. But I think this scenario is quite unlikely and would be far more likely to produce a plutocracy type outcome where the country is just strip mined.
Both A and B are already underway to some extent, with several of the named versions of B busily amassing and cementing their scope and reach.
It's important for Dominic and others to view this, at least the last hour or so, on the subject of investigations into Special Forces. Obviously it's not as if the troops accused get any opportunity to speak out, but here's a fella breaking cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuu3ShNddKA
Your recent post and Pharos lecture (which I attended) have sparked quite a flurry of responses. Some are pretty insightful and show a willingness to think outside the box - identifying what’s wrong with our current system and suggesting what needs to change. That, after all, was the core message of your Pharos talk.
Any suggestion that Nigel Farage offers any meaningful solutions to the country’s current predicament strikes me as misguided (sorry). Stu has highlighted his serious shortcomings. While your strategic input could certainly be valuable, it would as I understand it leave the underlying system intact.
As you’ve said both at Pharos and on BBC TV, the real issue is the system itself - particularly the central role political parties play in frontline politics. We need to find a way to engage voters more directly in shaping outcomes.
What you're alluding to, I think, is the urgent need to modernize Britain’s ancient political system
I’ve attempted to do just that - entitled Demos21 (69 pages).
It contains some fascinating new ideas – as one insider said - a new blend of people, ideas, institutions, training and AI.
You might find it of interest. The insiders may not at first. But I believe the voters will.
Regarding the mystery of why young men turned to the right - I am a generation Z white male and here’s my experience:
What you have to understand is the way left wing activists have tried to communicate with white men has been INCREDIBLY off putting and ostracising. In the mid 2010s, you had media companies like Buzzfeed and MTV news, which were huge on social media, putting out videos addressing white men and talking about white privilege and male privilege.
There were videos such as “36 questions women have for men” ( 36 Questions Women Have For MenYouTube · As/Is5.5M+ views · 9 years ago )or “24 questions Black People have for white people (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GuVMJmC0V98&pp=ygUacXVlc3Rpb25zIGZvciB3aGl0ZSBwZW9wbGU%3D )with questions like “Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge your privilege?” or “Who told you it was ok to touch people without their permission?” A particularly notable example of these video was a MTV video called “2017 New Years Resolutions for white guys” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBluYsydAVc). The backlash to it was so strong MTV news actually deleted it (MTV's "White Guy Resolutions 2017" Might Just Earn ...Reason Magazinehttps://reason.com › Politics › Elections › Election 2016).
This activism toward white men really really pissed people off at the time - I definitely felt they were judgemental and like they were trying to shame me when I saw it. You can bet that I, and many others, absolutely loved watching right wingers attack those videos and brutally mock them - it felt like they spoke for us a bit, telling the people who said all that stuff to go fuck themselves.
After 2017 or so, I think it’s become much less common for activists to be as ostracising as they were - but I think this era left a really big lasting impression on people. The meme of “crazy feminists who absolutely hate white men” was catapulted all over social media which young white men consumed, and has lived on ever since.
In addition to this, something that is less well remembered about the time is the presence of straight up black supremacy online and violence. People forget that in the mid 2010s, there was literal shootings of police by black nationalists like Gavin Long, who were motivated by police brutality (2016 shooting of Baton Rouge police officersWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2016_shooting_of_Bat... ) Probably the most horrifying moment of this was what is called “The 2017 Chicago Torture Incident” which received national news and was publicly condemned by Obama - but is largely forgotten now (2017 Chicago torture incidentWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2017_Chicago_torture...)
Whilst this is all about American politics, it’s very relevant to Britain and British young men - because young British people consume masses of American media, and we also fit into the umbrella of “white men”. It’s a shame no one really reflects on this recent history, and that the idiots who made such insensitive activism have not been held to account for it. Of course big media companies pumping out videos chastising white men to millions of viewers had an ugly effect on society. They thought that asking a non white person “where do you come from” was a micro aggression that made people uncomfortable - but saw no problem angrily demanding white men check their privilege. Now we have to clear up the mess.
Important background information, Blue Wave. Thank you for it. My particular solution for you and your cohort is to identify yourselves as Democratic Forces whose mission is to defeat Anti-Democratic forces of the kind you have listed in your post. Young white people like you are part of the Demos - the people - and anyone or any institution or organisation who attacks you as a young white person is, by definition, guilty of Anti-Democratic misbehaviour against one section of the Demos. As such they must be defeated by the Democratic Forces. Everybody in the human demos is either a Democratic Force OR an Anti-Democratic Force. This is the distinction you need to draw between everybody and everything - institutions, organisations, etc. Are they a Democratic Force or an Anti-Democratic Force? Everybody has the democratic sense/intelligence to know.
My GENERAL solution for ALL of the Demos is Swiss Direct Democracy. Like my particular solution for you and your cohort, it works immediately and continuously.
Following the Sheldonian event I though it would be interesting to use Systems Thinking tools to analyse the points DC made.
I wrote down 30 key points as best I could recall, and framed them as UDEs (undesireable effects of the current systems) and asked Grok to use Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints (TOC) methods of systems thinking to build the logic tree of cause and effect (Current Reality Tree or CRT) and to identify the underlying causes driving all the UDEs.
NB this is 'Quick and Dirty' rather than finished product.
Grok identified intermediate effects arising from the UDEs:
- Policies ignore electorate
- Poor HR, short-termism
- Unelected officials hold power
- Media distorts priorities
- Legal constraints
Grok then identified five root causes driving the CRT:
- Lack of mechanisms to align civil service incentives with electorate priorities
- Systemic failure to prioritize and develop competence in government roles
- Absence of robust accountability mechanisms
- Weak structural checks on civil service authority relative to elected officials
- External influences (media, legal frameworks) distort government priorities
Of these, the first seems to be the most central root cause. NB fixing this on its own will not work, because the other root causes will over time undermine any fix of a single root cause, since the system will always try to defend itself with any means it has left.
The fact that Grok could do this analysis at all surprised me, and shows that a lot of government work can be done by a very few people using AI. Also, Grok is able to start on some of the creative solutions-building, for example by looking how other, better-governed countries, avoid or resolve these problems.
Finally, it is fascinating to watch the evolution of new political events through this perspective.
Appendixes:
A. My list of UDEs:
1 The government does not govern according to the priorities of the electorate
2 Many of the actions of the government are wasteful, incompetent, and / or perverse from the perspective of the electorate
3 Cabinet ministers (including the PM) control very few of the actions of the government
4 The top civil service job-holders control almost all of the actions of the government
5 The top civil service job-holders are not often competent at doing difficult things
6 The goal of civil service HR is not to build competence at doing difficult things, but to train 'expert generalists'
7 Top civil service job-holder career paths do not build competence at doing difficult things
8 The lack of competence at doing difficult things leads to widespread large failures
9 Widespread large failures lead to a culture of Cover-Up
10 The culture of Cover-Up eliminates accountability
11 The culture of Cover-Up prevents systematic learning and improvement
12 The culture of Cover-Up prevents individual learning and improvement
13 The culture of Cover-Up facilitates incompetence
14 Lack of accountability allows incompetence to be repeated and incompetent individuals to be promoted
15 The culture of incompetence makes competent staff want to leave, reinforcing the culture of incompetence
16 Ministers control very few of the actions of their departments
17 Ministers are neither selected for nor trained in the management skills required to get difficult things done
18 Ministerial careers involve a series of short-term roles, insufficient to develop the depth of knowledge and experience to control their departments and get difficult things done
19 MPs, including including Ministers, focus on advancing their careers
20 MPs, including Ministers, see the legacy media as critical to their prospects of advancing their careers
21 MPs, including Ministers, reflexively respond to the promptings of the legacy media
22 Top civil service job-holders don't want the same things as the electorate
23 Top civil service job-holders are often shielded from the effect on the electorate of the policies they implement
24 Top civil service job-holders use taxpayer's money to fund activism against the things the electorate want
25 Top civil service job-holders often have ambitions beyond their top civil service jobs: UN, World bank, UNESCO, in the past EU, NGOs, Company directorships, etc
26 Top civil service job-holders can use their control of information to give them control over legacy media
27 Top civil service job-holders can use their control over legacy media to control MPs and ministers
28 Judicial review prevents many actions requiring decisiveness and despatch
29 Judicial review adds massive time and cost to many government actions
30 Judges' interpretations of ECHR prevent border control and waste taxpayers' money
31 Top civil service job-holders use Judicial Review, ECHR and International Law as pretexts to prevent Ministers from controlling the actions of their departments
B. Grok's CRT
UDE 1: Gov’t misaligned with electorate
↑
UDE 22, 23, 24, 25: Civil servants’ goals diverge
↑
IE 1, 2: Policies ignore electorate
↑
RC 1: No incentive alignment
UDE 8: Large failures
↑
UDE 5, 6, 7, 17, 18: Incompetence
↑
IE 3, 4: Poor HR, short-termism
↑
RC 2: Failure to develop competence
UDE 10: Cover-up culture
↑
UDE 8, IE 5: Failures hidden
↑
RC 3: No accountability
↓
UDE 11, 12, 13, 14, 15: No learning, incompetence persists
UDE 3, 16: Ministers lack control
↑
UDE 4, 26, 27, 30: Civil servants dominate, use media/law
Coming back to this topic, I analysed the situation further with Grok's help, coming up with six reforms ('Injections' in the terminology of TOC) which together break today's doom loop of dysfunction. Of course, things are in such a mess that there is much more which could be done or should be done, but the question is what is the minimum that must be done, so that the systematic failure does not just re-assert itself after a short struggle.
Any new government hoping to achieve sustained change will have to be ready to legislate for these reforms on day 1, with legislation drafted and a solid majority of MPs on board and ready to vote.
The reforms are:
1. Make 10-15% of Senior Civil Service (SEO and above) roles “at will” policy positions, answerable to Ministers with 'hire and fire' power.*
2. Reform Civil service career paths away from making 'expert generalists' and into taking in expert specialists, and training them in strategy and leadership skills.
3. Link pay, promotion, and retention for civil servants to measurable outcomes aligned with the electorate's priorities.
4. Install a Finland / Estonia-inspired e-governance platform for real-time policy coordination, which tracks policy progress, publishes public dashboards, and allows public input, so as to maintain alignment with the electorate's priorities.
5. Require NGOs receiving public funds or influencing policy to register publicly, disclosing funding sources, lobbying activities, and policy submissions.**
6. Limit the scope of judicial review to fixing procedural errors, rather than amending policy. Legislate to clarify ECHR interpretations, prioritizing national sovereignty and electorate mandates.***
* There is also a good case for 25% or 50%
** There is also a good case for cutting off all taxpayer funding from every organisation which tries to influence policy and / or forbidding every organisation that receives taxpayer funding from attempting to influence policy
*** There is also a good case for legislating to leave the ECHR
Thomas Vibert: 'Also, Grok is able to start on some of the creative solutions-building, for example by looking how other, better-governed countries, avoid or resolve these problems.'
I've already done this. Switzerland is the ONLY country in the West to have avoided or resolved these problems, via Swiss Direct Democracy. The Swiss model is universally scalable and therefore universally applicable.
RE Government organisation and systems thinking you need to return back to the Second World War as there are significant aspects of this which need to be drawn from for effective running. Your focus on Alanbrooke is bang on but you are barely scratching the surface on the ecosystem forming within Whitehall/Armed Forces of predominately autistic men systematically overhauling and revolutionising the Armed Forces until Commonwealth forces were the world’s best by 44/45. The network centred around Brooke but also included the likes of Grigg, Monty, Ramsay, Hobart etc.
Of particular note is Monty - you seem to be sleeping on him at the moment but the simple fact was that he was *the best* systems builder operating within any high command of the Second World War. Most popular historiography of him is tainted by Anglophobic American media and the pathological dislike of Insiders of revolutionisers like him, but investigate the actual on the ground facts and it’s incredibly clear that he was the only person with the full knowledge of how to effectively craft, refine and operate a world class organisation in such a manner that actually worked. High up on your research list should be how he went about crafting his GHQ as between him and his CoS Freddie de Guingand they had the single most efficient staff operation in the world at the time - his frameworks for running operations should be the model for Downing Street + other departments.
During the 1980's I was briefly in the communist party. I left after they said they'd be prepared to concrete the world over to get their way.
Years later seeing Van Jones wave a copy of “Rules for Radicals” during the first Obama campaign was a red flag, I had also attended an HR meeting in May 2001 to be told about equality, diversity and inclusion. Two red flags. Since then we'd then been bombarded with HR training courses telling us if any offence had been taken outside of working hours we were expected to denounce any colleagues to the authorities (HR) as you'd expect from any totalitarian regime. Three red flags. A lot of emails from India were quoting the “Art of War” in their signature settings. Was that four?
In 2012 I was wondering how corporate culture had suddenly jumped into the mainstream. A student made a similar comment on the radio about universities.
Something was definitely amiss.
Fake News
Identity politics
Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, opinion, intelligence, and social class.
Be the victim to inflame, create divides and chaos in society.
The aim here is to make them feel isolated and alone. This leaves them vulnerable.
Disinformation
• Find the cracks in society
• The big lie
• A kernel of truth
• Conceal the origin
• Useful idiots
• Deny everything
• Play the long game.
If confronted:
• Admit nothing
• Deny everything
• Make counter accusations.
Standard Propaganda Techniques
------------------------------
Repeat a lie long enough until it becomes the truth.
Divide and rule tactics.
Salami politics.
Victim-hood.
Destroy conventional wisdom.
Violent Revolution
The basic rules for a violent revolution are :
A strong leader who can bring people together for a violent overthrow.
A dedicated violent force/s to fight the existing police, army, or other forces defending the current regime.
The door to the ruling elites is rotten enough to be easily kicked in.
Political Revolution (TBC)
Examples from Russia, Germany, Cambodia, now.
Vladaslav Surkov the Puppet Master
Pincer movement (As Russia 2010)
Not a shot is fired book
Salami politics
Targets (Unions, Students, BBC, Times etc)
Fronts (CPGB, SWP, RCP, CND, Feminism)
(hidden agenda Chapman Pincher)
Unions & HR
Critical Thinking (Frankfurt School)
Propaganda from pamphlet to Smart Phone. Examples
John Birch Society
Tragedy and Hope
How children are raised. Comparisons. USA education examples.
Plus examples.
Surveillance capitalism.
2) Lessons in Propaganda. Victim-hood and Born Guilty; Recent Revolutions
International Socialism (Communism) - Class War - Violent revolution
Oppressors : Bourgeois
Oppressed : Proletariat
National Socialism (Nazi) - Race War - Political revolution
Oppressors : Jewish Bourgeois
Oppressed : Aryan Proletariat
Progressive Socialism (Woke) - Race & Class War - Political revolution
Oppressors : Whiteness (Europeans & Colonisers) , Men (Masculinity), The 1%, Conservatives
Oppressed : Women, LGBT etc, the poor, racial minorities
(These change depending on location, BIPOC in America and BPOC in Europe).
However, the Russian, German, Chinese, Vietnamese & Cambodian revolutions had clear leaders but not the Progressive Socialists, there is no Mao or Stalin. (There is Xi and Putin).
Comparisons on how the "Art of War" and propaganda techniques have been used
by Progressive and National Socialists.
• Using current biology trend; the National Socialists used eugenics and the Progressive Socialists use transsexualism. (Russia has it's own history here with the Olympics + 20's Red Berlin).
• National Socialists burned books and the Progressive Socialists ban them.
• Hero martyr; Horst Wessel for the National Socialists and George Floyd for the Progressive Socialists.
• Both have re-written history; the National Socialists with the Aryan world builders, Progressive Socialists with black Cleopatra & black built stone-henge.
• Both removed Christian (or all religious) imagery from social places, schools and administrations.
• Both used iconoclasm's to remove statues, paintings of the "oppressors" to install more politically agreeable artwork.
• Both used new holidays, flags and parades to carry message and to include schools and all public spaces. (Complaints & denouncements if flags are not shown).
• Both are anti-Semitic (There is a notion of the left wing in the UK relying on Muslim votes).
George Orwell writes
"Micro-aggression" appears to be taken from 1984 as "face-crime".
Reduction in vocabulary
Confusing political messages, George Osbourne saying the markets are going up when quite the reverse was happening. In 1984 the price of chocolate was lowered (increased) to a higher value than before the price change.
Lessons in Propaganda. Russian Active Measures and it's aim;
Active measures (активные мероприятия) Ideological subversion aimed to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
(This has been operating since 1922 under Stalin. It came back in 1959 with Khrushchev and was put into warp speed in 2001).
Ideological Subversion. "It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralise a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism, Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or contra-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism." - Yuri Bezmenov (KGB).
The long march through the institutions.
The methodology is to use a process of :
• Demoralisation (20 years, started 2001)
• Destabilisation (started 2021)
• Crisis (TBD)
• Normalisation (TBD)
To subdue the enemy nation from the inside.
If Russia makes any movement into NATO would we go to war for Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia? China with Taiwan? How far can they push the boundaries.
If we do, do the men have the fighting spirit and patriotism of previous generations?
No.
The misandry is far and wide in the west through ideological subversion, the culture degenerate and perverse. White men feel excluded from years of DEI and have no place in their home or home country. Don't expect blue collar workers to fight fully committed. This is the whole point. To subdue the enemy nation from the inside.
Ideological subversion created havoc in the Russian army of the first world war to set the stage for the civil war and revolution.
It mentions in Dr Zhivago (about 70 mins) the unhappy men in Russia went to war. Why unhappy? Years of feminism and ideological subversion.
The Devils by Dostoevsky describes blue spectacle wearing individuals saying 2+2=5 because it made them sound more interesting.
Perceived Aims of Progressive Socialism
• Weaken the men
• Empower the women
• Make heterosexuality the perversity
• Conditioned reaction to events.
• Limit free speech for safety
• Promote abortion and euthanasia.
• To bring in a political change?
I don't believe this political movement was meant to succeed but to bring a new totalitarianism more in line with Russia and China. Their influence is being felt around the world with BRICS and the Belt and Road project.
Edward Gibbons Quote
The most worthless in society are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character or station to justify the partial distinction.
4) Previous civilisations
Five signs for the end of a civilisation
Displays of affluence.
Sex and perversion of sex.
Art, freakish and sensational.
Wealth gap.
Increased demand to live off the state.
x) Money
Gold
Promise
Notes
Fiat
x) Economics
Ricardo, Any money you give the poor will always result in more poor
Malthus, reduction of people through war, famine or natural disaster.
Sumner
Marx
Keynes
Friedman
Today (Steve Keen, Mark Blyth)
There's a lot more on this, a lot of heading above.
There is a whole religious piece, Gospels (MMLI) the next 1453 (2031) Psalms and the Proverbs. Essenes Revelations, life of Jesus vs story of Jesus, Essenes vs Paul, Pistas Sophia & the three initiates.
The UK is on a war footing, Belgium are drafting, then ineveitably step by step as anyone using these technique knows, war. I'll wait it out and not join in the game.
Wise man. I intend to play another game entirely in order to stop this game in its tracks. Everything will be revealed later when all my resources are deployed and released simultaneously.
I’ve just started reading Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring - which is a history of the 1848 revolutions. I highly recommend you give it a go too.
1. DC admitted that Reform and Farage are what I've been saying they are for months now - just another iteration of the Liberal Establishment. So no future there for DC's ideas. Meet the 'new' party; same as the old parties.
2. As DC discounts the Tories and Labour parties as parties with no future, he hasn't got anyone in prospect to deliver his (DC's) agenda. People first ...
3. DC's interlocutor queried him as to whether 'democracy' has a future at 1.17 and got an unclear answer. Neither man showed any awareness of the success of Swiss Direct Democracy in solving every problem that afflicts every other Western and non-Western country in the present era.
I must say Dominic, I watched your recent talk via Pharos Foundation and I think you may have found your fulcrum of leverage.
Critical appraisal paired with radical common sense.
If you can persist with these appearances, you will shift the political appetite in a compound way, slow at first then much faster. You might have to repeat yourself a lot on the way, but all the right people are listening to this school of thought.
I think the UK is approaching a time where people just want the trains to run on time, just want interest rates to be low, just want schools to teach their kids english and maths literacy, just want houses to cost what the bricks cost, just want the government to “fuck off and do your job”.
Whether we get there by 2029, or later, I’m not so sure?
But your broader framing is very good.
Here is the old environment
These are the systems we developed for the old environment (or that emerged).
These systems did very well for a while in their intended environment.
But now something has changed. Something is broken. We all see it. We know this because our old systems that used to be good, are now failing.
Here is how the environment has changed, or the previously good system broke down.
Now we are stranded or going backwards (see two decades of lost growth).
These are the systems and architecture we need to explore in order to adapt well and recover our former status / position in the world.
Having written the above I realise there are some important pivots to establish.
I think some important questions to ask yourself are:
Did we design our old (current) system because we were smart? Or did they emerge because we were flexible back then, and we have since ossified (good things stopped emerging)?
Why are these existing systems failing now? Has the environment changed (the media has), or are the systems ossified and corrupted (did good systems rot?) Probably some combo of both but should be able to articulate the nuance.
How do we change/adapt our system going forward? Do we try and design and impose a solution, or do we de-ossify (cut out the rot and plant seeds) and let system components compete and the best component solution to emerge?
For our long term benefit how do we either a) inoculate for ossification in an intended emergent system or b) ensure future adaptation reviews of an imposed design system?
Now I think the emergent path is very much a Western school of long term strategy, and the imposed designed system is very much an Eastern strategy.
In recent years the Eastern approach has enjoyed more success, but I don’t think that means it is superior. I just don’t think the West has operated its historical strategic emergence M.O. in a very thoughtful manner. Again that doesn’t mean to say emergence is superior either, but I think freedom and institutional emergence are pretty much the same thing. So personally, I instinctively feel we should probably go that way.
Boyd's trinity tells us that the quality of the people are the beginning and end of all complex systems. No process, no algorithm, no policy package, no balance of competing interests can accept an influx of corrupt, dishonest charlatans and function to the benefit of society. The mountain of red tape that has appeared to attempt to handle the growing dishonesty that is endemic in the system has transparently failed. DC's original vision for ARIA rested on a foundation of assumed rock-solid integrity from the executive board and grant applicants. I don't see that environment around me today. The high trust and high integrity society that existed within the UK and the USA in the mid 20th century is no longer here. The mass importation of people from low-trust cultures has permanently nuked this prerequisite for a functioning advanced research agency.
Lies and dishonesty have saturated the institutions to the point where nothing functions any more. I think this points to a metaphysical malady, because truth is a metaphysical property.
In the prior post on Strauss, DC observes:
"freedom of speech includes the right to lie: all lies are immoral but also mostly legal"
The Enlightenment is what brought us to this point. The secular model of government, decoupled from the standards of morality as set out by Christ, has inevitably augured into the floor and achieved levels of wickedness and malice that cannot be plausibly denied. Every man is free to decide for himself what his morality will be that day and here we are, shocked! shocked! that complex systems that rely on honesty, integrity and truthfulness are failing to function.
The churches are empty. The people have turned their backs on Christ. There is no secular system that can convert this slurry into gold. The King has the authority to conduct an inquisition and purge the Church of England of apostates, but he chooses not to. So here we sit. As President Bukele stated, the spiritual war decides the material war, not the other way around - and he has the results to back his claim.
17.11Mins: '' ... they're optimising for what the system wants instead of optimising for what the voters want ...".
So it's the political "system" versus " what the voters want" - i.e. the political ''system" versus democracy. This is the distinction I always draw, yet DC and everyone else do not. Why do DC and everyone else fail to draw this distinction? That's easy. They are parts of the anti-democratic political "system", which is why they cannot see that Swiss Direct Democracy is the obvious solution to the anti-democracy of the political "system" they criticise.
Minor correction - the excellent David Betz podcast with the even more excellent Louise Perry is on the coming cvi WAR, not civil violence. Seems an important clarification! He spends the last ten minutes or so discussing that
a. it's inevitable
b. the best thing anyone can do is prepare for it.
The whole thing is horrifying. He is a long long way from some kind of survivalist crank.
Trump has added markedly to the simplicity of espionage by importing the biggest AI chipmaker (TSMC) from Taiwan into the US, replete with multiple numbers of CCP AI experts as longtime embedded staffers! Stupid is as stupid does.
<context>: Old parties were architected in the age of newspapers and transitioned seamlessly into the even more information centralised and monopolistic TV age. Since Steve Jobs "oh one more thing" moment, the entire landscape of information is completely restructured.
Society has very fundamentally changed from top down single source information (TV), to poly directional highly networked flows of information (social media).
It's now pretty much impossible to control what people see and think. You can pump content as hard as you like, if people don't respond to it the algorithm buries it. Therefore we live in an age of triggering and radicalising information this is an unstoppable mathematical outcome of the foundational structure of how information now flows through society.
</context>
On that backdrop, the old parties are dead. Literally gasping dinosaurs stumbling around after the asteroid hit. They cannot and will not survive in this new environment.
The same applies to pretty much all institutions and even corporate brands. In the sense that they are fictional collective identities of legal entities. The whole concept of a corporate brand is going to die within a generation or two. Brands were an efficient way to communicate via super dense centralised pipelines that were extremely expensive to lease (half time TV commercials, etc). TV viewing figures are crashing, and even when the TV is on your attention is on your phone.
So what matters in the future?
Everything will be hyper personified, Trump personifies MAGA, Musk personifies Tesla and SpaceX, Farage personifies polite political protest, it's the Joe Roeganification of communication. Audiences want a human connection a face, a name, some tangible human who they can like. They don't want soundbites and splash screens, they want longform intimacy and trust building, smartphones offer an open platform for all personalities to broadcast themselves.
Nike marketing sort of started this snowball 50 years ago, using athletes to personify their brand, but smartphones and Zuckerberg's network hypothesis have brought it to critical mass.
What does that mean?
It means Gary's Economics podcast carries more gravitas with the British electorate than a Bank of England press release. It means Nigel Farage and his iPhone have more political gravitas than both the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the BBC combined.
Hyper personification is a relatively new phenomena, but it is only going to become stronger and stronger.
The only other dimension for 21st Century communication is audience-identity symbolism.
Because of the triggering and radicalising nature of attention maximising algorithms, audiences are becoming increasingly sensitive to the symbols of their own identity. They are becoming more and more proud and loyal to the symbols of who they perceive themselves to be.
Essentially these are things that people feel proud of. The SAS is a symbolic representation of the British people. Likewise the Quran is a powerful symbol of identity for millions of people. There are a few things (I won't list them) that are identity symbols among groups of the electorate and someone is going to figure out how to integrate these things as symbolic props to build non-contradictory electoral coalitions.
Any contradiction or paradox within an electoral coalition is pretty much irreparable in the future as there is no way to restrict the networked flow of information (LGBT for Palestine is not a sustainable coalition, as homosexuality criminalised and attracts a 10 year prison sentence in Palestine, that is not something that is going to be durable in the face of events), this likely leads to more numerous smaller natural coalitions forming. We're probably heading for a more volatile multiparty system where 4 or 5 parties challenge elections and rarely win consecutive terms.
This plays havoc with our FPTP parliamentary composition.
This will lead to even shorter term political and economic strategies, likely putting us at a structural disadvantage on the world stage as rival nations will be able to bully our perpetual succession of lame duck governments. It also means the churn of politicians in parliament will accelerate, which may be a good think as it will impose defacto terms limits via instability.
Strategically, the only hope for the UK is one of two scenarios
A) If someone somehow forms a durable 35-40% coalition.
Already there is the stalking horse of Islamists, who are on a slow and grinding path to this figure by virtual of a superior fertility rate and mass immigration, and will probably reach it some point in the medium future. So JD Vance is probably correct, there is a short window for the UK to forge a durable new electoral coalition, born of the network information age that is strong enough to exit all the ruinous historic treaties. Treaties we drafted but that have been weaponised against us, and our sclerotic contemporary political class, and actually stop the scales tipping forever against the Western liberal ideals that have been our way of life since Magna Carta.
The UK has already crested the hill on our descent into violent upheaval. You aren't allowed to say that in public places, but at private parties everyone thinks it (outside the London pimple at least).
I think Farage is almost a slam dunk for 2029, unless there is some shock even that jerks a new movement into being, I also think Farage is glaringly ill prepared for Downing Street and losing control of his schedule and may even self sabotage as the moment approaches. I think he is aware of his own super-position and is far far more comfortable outside the tent pissing in. Deep down he knows all too well that entering Number 10 will destroy his public persona, tear his life apart and cap his entire journey with a bitter ending. Farage as Kingmaker is more likely, but his own ego and superposition prevents that until the time actually comes.
B) A sort of 1990's South Africa where a deep state is architected into existence that wields strategic oversight away from the churn of front line Parliament. This is not really democracy, and there are several forms this could take, e.g. House of Lords, Supreme Court, City of London, Blair Institute's sprawling constellation of quangos, Intelligence Agencies, banking community, business sector, or maybe some group of deep pocketed capitalists. But I think this scenario is quite unlikely and would be far more likely to produce a plutocracy type outcome where the country is just strip mined.
Both A and B are already underway to some extent, with several of the named versions of B busily amassing and cementing their scope and reach.
On the whole, not a great outlook for UK.
It's important for Dominic and others to view this, at least the last hour or so, on the subject of investigations into Special Forces. Obviously it's not as if the troops accused get any opportunity to speak out, but here's a fella breaking cover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuu3ShNddKA
Thanks have linked in new blog - yes a legit story
Your recent post and Pharos lecture (which I attended) have sparked quite a flurry of responses. Some are pretty insightful and show a willingness to think outside the box - identifying what’s wrong with our current system and suggesting what needs to change. That, after all, was the core message of your Pharos talk.
Any suggestion that Nigel Farage offers any meaningful solutions to the country’s current predicament strikes me as misguided (sorry). Stu has highlighted his serious shortcomings. While your strategic input could certainly be valuable, it would as I understand it leave the underlying system intact.
As you’ve said both at Pharos and on BBC TV, the real issue is the system itself - particularly the central role political parties play in frontline politics. We need to find a way to engage voters more directly in shaping outcomes.
What you're alluding to, I think, is the urgent need to modernize Britain’s ancient political system
I’ve attempted to do just that - entitled Demos21 (69 pages).
It contains some fascinating new ideas – as one insider said - a new blend of people, ideas, institutions, training and AI.
You might find it of interest. The insiders may not at first. But I believe the voters will.
Get in touch if you’d like to take a look.
sure - send to dmc2 dot cummings @ gmail dot com - I dont look at that often but put physicist from blog in subject line!
Regarding the mystery of why young men turned to the right - I am a generation Z white male and here’s my experience:
What you have to understand is the way left wing activists have tried to communicate with white men has been INCREDIBLY off putting and ostracising. In the mid 2010s, you had media companies like Buzzfeed and MTV news, which were huge on social media, putting out videos addressing white men and talking about white privilege and male privilege.
There were videos such as “36 questions women have for men” ( 36 Questions Women Have For MenYouTube · As/Is5.5M+ views · 9 years ago )or “24 questions Black People have for white people (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GuVMJmC0V98&pp=ygUacXVlc3Rpb25zIGZvciB3aGl0ZSBwZW9wbGU%3D )with questions like “Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge your privilege?” or “Who told you it was ok to touch people without their permission?” A particularly notable example of these video was a MTV video called “2017 New Years Resolutions for white guys” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBluYsydAVc). The backlash to it was so strong MTV news actually deleted it (MTV's "White Guy Resolutions 2017" Might Just Earn ...Reason Magazinehttps://reason.com › Politics › Elections › Election 2016).
This activism toward white men really really pissed people off at the time - I definitely felt they were judgemental and like they were trying to shame me when I saw it. You can bet that I, and many others, absolutely loved watching right wingers attack those videos and brutally mock them - it felt like they spoke for us a bit, telling the people who said all that stuff to go fuck themselves.
After 2017 or so, I think it’s become much less common for activists to be as ostracising as they were - but I think this era left a really big lasting impression on people. The meme of “crazy feminists who absolutely hate white men” was catapulted all over social media which young white men consumed, and has lived on ever since.
In addition to this, something that is less well remembered about the time is the presence of straight up black supremacy online and violence. People forget that in the mid 2010s, there was literal shootings of police by black nationalists like Gavin Long, who were motivated by police brutality (2016 shooting of Baton Rouge police officersWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2016_shooting_of_Bat... ) Probably the most horrifying moment of this was what is called “The 2017 Chicago Torture Incident” which received national news and was publicly condemned by Obama - but is largely forgotten now (2017 Chicago torture incidentWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › 2017_Chicago_torture...)
Whilst this is all about American politics, it’s very relevant to Britain and British young men - because young British people consume masses of American media, and we also fit into the umbrella of “white men”. It’s a shame no one really reflects on this recent history, and that the idiots who made such insensitive activism have not been held to account for it. Of course big media companies pumping out videos chastising white men to millions of viewers had an ugly effect on society. They thought that asking a non white person “where do you come from” was a micro aggression that made people uncomfortable - but saw no problem angrily demanding white men check their privilege. Now we have to clear up the mess.
Important background information, Blue Wave. Thank you for it. My particular solution for you and your cohort is to identify yourselves as Democratic Forces whose mission is to defeat Anti-Democratic forces of the kind you have listed in your post. Young white people like you are part of the Demos - the people - and anyone or any institution or organisation who attacks you as a young white person is, by definition, guilty of Anti-Democratic misbehaviour against one section of the Demos. As such they must be defeated by the Democratic Forces. Everybody in the human demos is either a Democratic Force OR an Anti-Democratic Force. This is the distinction you need to draw between everybody and everything - institutions, organisations, etc. Are they a Democratic Force or an Anti-Democratic Force? Everybody has the democratic sense/intelligence to know.
My GENERAL solution for ALL of the Demos is Swiss Direct Democracy. Like my particular solution for you and your cohort, it works immediately and continuously.
Following the Sheldonian event I though it would be interesting to use Systems Thinking tools to analyse the points DC made.
I wrote down 30 key points as best I could recall, and framed them as UDEs (undesireable effects of the current systems) and asked Grok to use Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints (TOC) methods of systems thinking to build the logic tree of cause and effect (Current Reality Tree or CRT) and to identify the underlying causes driving all the UDEs.
NB this is 'Quick and Dirty' rather than finished product.
Grok identified intermediate effects arising from the UDEs:
- Policies ignore electorate
- Poor HR, short-termism
- Unelected officials hold power
- Media distorts priorities
- Legal constraints
Grok then identified five root causes driving the CRT:
- Lack of mechanisms to align civil service incentives with electorate priorities
- Systemic failure to prioritize and develop competence in government roles
- Absence of robust accountability mechanisms
- Weak structural checks on civil service authority relative to elected officials
- External influences (media, legal frameworks) distort government priorities
Of these, the first seems to be the most central root cause. NB fixing this on its own will not work, because the other root causes will over time undermine any fix of a single root cause, since the system will always try to defend itself with any means it has left.
The fact that Grok could do this analysis at all surprised me, and shows that a lot of government work can be done by a very few people using AI. Also, Grok is able to start on some of the creative solutions-building, for example by looking how other, better-governed countries, avoid or resolve these problems.
Finally, it is fascinating to watch the evolution of new political events through this perspective.
Appendixes:
A. My list of UDEs:
1 The government does not govern according to the priorities of the electorate
2 Many of the actions of the government are wasteful, incompetent, and / or perverse from the perspective of the electorate
3 Cabinet ministers (including the PM) control very few of the actions of the government
4 The top civil service job-holders control almost all of the actions of the government
5 The top civil service job-holders are not often competent at doing difficult things
6 The goal of civil service HR is not to build competence at doing difficult things, but to train 'expert generalists'
7 Top civil service job-holder career paths do not build competence at doing difficult things
8 The lack of competence at doing difficult things leads to widespread large failures
9 Widespread large failures lead to a culture of Cover-Up
10 The culture of Cover-Up eliminates accountability
11 The culture of Cover-Up prevents systematic learning and improvement
12 The culture of Cover-Up prevents individual learning and improvement
13 The culture of Cover-Up facilitates incompetence
14 Lack of accountability allows incompetence to be repeated and incompetent individuals to be promoted
15 The culture of incompetence makes competent staff want to leave, reinforcing the culture of incompetence
16 Ministers control very few of the actions of their departments
17 Ministers are neither selected for nor trained in the management skills required to get difficult things done
18 Ministerial careers involve a series of short-term roles, insufficient to develop the depth of knowledge and experience to control their departments and get difficult things done
19 MPs, including including Ministers, focus on advancing their careers
20 MPs, including Ministers, see the legacy media as critical to their prospects of advancing their careers
21 MPs, including Ministers, reflexively respond to the promptings of the legacy media
22 Top civil service job-holders don't want the same things as the electorate
23 Top civil service job-holders are often shielded from the effect on the electorate of the policies they implement
24 Top civil service job-holders use taxpayer's money to fund activism against the things the electorate want
25 Top civil service job-holders often have ambitions beyond their top civil service jobs: UN, World bank, UNESCO, in the past EU, NGOs, Company directorships, etc
26 Top civil service job-holders can use their control of information to give them control over legacy media
27 Top civil service job-holders can use their control over legacy media to control MPs and ministers
28 Judicial review prevents many actions requiring decisiveness and despatch
29 Judicial review adds massive time and cost to many government actions
30 Judges' interpretations of ECHR prevent border control and waste taxpayers' money
31 Top civil service job-holders use Judicial Review, ECHR and International Law as pretexts to prevent Ministers from controlling the actions of their departments
B. Grok's CRT
UDE 1: Gov’t misaligned with electorate
↑
UDE 22, 23, 24, 25: Civil servants’ goals diverge
↑
IE 1, 2: Policies ignore electorate
↑
RC 1: No incentive alignment
UDE 8: Large failures
↑
UDE 5, 6, 7, 17, 18: Incompetence
↑
IE 3, 4: Poor HR, short-termism
↑
RC 2: Failure to develop competence
UDE 10: Cover-up culture
↑
UDE 8, IE 5: Failures hidden
↑
RC 3: No accountability
↓
UDE 11, 12, 13, 14, 15: No learning, incompetence persists
UDE 3, 16: Ministers lack control
↑
UDE 4, 26, 27, 30: Civil servants dominate, use media/law
↑
IE 6: Unelected officials hold power
↑
RC 4: Weak checks on civil service authority
UDE 19, 20, 21: MPs media-driven
↑
IE 7: Media distorts priorities
↑
UDE 28, 29: Judicial review, ECHR issues
↑
IE 8: Legal constraints
↑
RC 5: External influences distort priorities
Coming back to this topic, I analysed the situation further with Grok's help, coming up with six reforms ('Injections' in the terminology of TOC) which together break today's doom loop of dysfunction. Of course, things are in such a mess that there is much more which could be done or should be done, but the question is what is the minimum that must be done, so that the systematic failure does not just re-assert itself after a short struggle.
Any new government hoping to achieve sustained change will have to be ready to legislate for these reforms on day 1, with legislation drafted and a solid majority of MPs on board and ready to vote.
The reforms are:
1. Make 10-15% of Senior Civil Service (SEO and above) roles “at will” policy positions, answerable to Ministers with 'hire and fire' power.*
2. Reform Civil service career paths away from making 'expert generalists' and into taking in expert specialists, and training them in strategy and leadership skills.
3. Link pay, promotion, and retention for civil servants to measurable outcomes aligned with the electorate's priorities.
4. Install a Finland / Estonia-inspired e-governance platform for real-time policy coordination, which tracks policy progress, publishes public dashboards, and allows public input, so as to maintain alignment with the electorate's priorities.
5. Require NGOs receiving public funds or influencing policy to register publicly, disclosing funding sources, lobbying activities, and policy submissions.**
6. Limit the scope of judicial review to fixing procedural errors, rather than amending policy. Legislate to clarify ECHR interpretations, prioritizing national sovereignty and electorate mandates.***
* There is also a good case for 25% or 50%
** There is also a good case for cutting off all taxpayer funding from every organisation which tries to influence policy and / or forbidding every organisation that receives taxpayer funding from attempting to influence policy
*** There is also a good case for legislating to leave the ECHR
thanks for this .
Thomas Vibert: 'Also, Grok is able to start on some of the creative solutions-building, for example by looking how other, better-governed countries, avoid or resolve these problems.'
I've already done this. Switzerland is the ONLY country in the West to have avoided or resolved these problems, via Swiss Direct Democracy. The Swiss model is universally scalable and therefore universally applicable.
https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en
Could you share the focus group reports you showed to the Corbyn team in 2019 when you told them to vote for May's Withdrawal Agreement? Thanks.
RE Government organisation and systems thinking you need to return back to the Second World War as there are significant aspects of this which need to be drawn from for effective running. Your focus on Alanbrooke is bang on but you are barely scratching the surface on the ecosystem forming within Whitehall/Armed Forces of predominately autistic men systematically overhauling and revolutionising the Armed Forces until Commonwealth forces were the world’s best by 44/45. The network centred around Brooke but also included the likes of Grigg, Monty, Ramsay, Hobart etc.
Of particular note is Monty - you seem to be sleeping on him at the moment but the simple fact was that he was *the best* systems builder operating within any high command of the Second World War. Most popular historiography of him is tainted by Anglophobic American media and the pathological dislike of Insiders of revolutionisers like him, but investigate the actual on the ground facts and it’s incredibly clear that he was the only person with the full knowledge of how to effectively craft, refine and operate a world class organisation in such a manner that actually worked. High up on your research list should be how he went about crafting his GHQ as between him and his CoS Freddie de Guingand they had the single most efficient staff operation in the world at the time - his frameworks for running operations should be the model for Downing Street + other departments.
Background
During the 1980's I was briefly in the communist party. I left after they said they'd be prepared to concrete the world over to get their way.
Years later seeing Van Jones wave a copy of “Rules for Radicals” during the first Obama campaign was a red flag, I had also attended an HR meeting in May 2001 to be told about equality, diversity and inclusion. Two red flags. Since then we'd then been bombarded with HR training courses telling us if any offence had been taken outside of working hours we were expected to denounce any colleagues to the authorities (HR) as you'd expect from any totalitarian regime. Three red flags. A lot of emails from India were quoting the “Art of War” in their signature settings. Was that four?
In 2012 I was wondering how corporate culture had suddenly jumped into the mainstream. A student made a similar comment on the radio about universities.
Something was definitely amiss.
Fake News
Identity politics
Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, opinion, intelligence, and social class.
Be the victim to inflame, create divides and chaos in society.
The aim here is to make them feel isolated and alone. This leaves them vulnerable.
Disinformation
• Find the cracks in society
• The big lie
• A kernel of truth
• Conceal the origin
• Useful idiots
• Deny everything
• Play the long game.
If confronted:
• Admit nothing
• Deny everything
• Make counter accusations.
Standard Propaganda Techniques
------------------------------
Repeat a lie long enough until it becomes the truth.
Divide and rule tactics.
Salami politics.
Victim-hood.
Destroy conventional wisdom.
Violent Revolution
The basic rules for a violent revolution are :
A strong leader who can bring people together for a violent overthrow.
A dedicated violent force/s to fight the existing police, army, or other forces defending the current regime.
The door to the ruling elites is rotten enough to be easily kicked in.
Political Revolution (TBC)
Examples from Russia, Germany, Cambodia, now.
Vladaslav Surkov the Puppet Master
Pincer movement (As Russia 2010)
Not a shot is fired book
Salami politics
Targets (Unions, Students, BBC, Times etc)
Fronts (CPGB, SWP, RCP, CND, Feminism)
(hidden agenda Chapman Pincher)
Unions & HR
Critical Thinking (Frankfurt School)
Propaganda from pamphlet to Smart Phone. Examples
John Birch Society
Tragedy and Hope
How children are raised. Comparisons. USA education examples.
Plus examples.
Surveillance capitalism.
2) Lessons in Propaganda. Victim-hood and Born Guilty; Recent Revolutions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Socialism (Communism) - Class War - Violent revolution
Oppressors : Bourgeois
Oppressed : Proletariat
National Socialism (Nazi) - Race War - Political revolution
Oppressors : Jewish Bourgeois
Oppressed : Aryan Proletariat
Progressive Socialism (Woke) - Race & Class War - Political revolution
Oppressors : Whiteness (Europeans & Colonisers) , Men (Masculinity), The 1%, Conservatives
Oppressed : Women, LGBT etc, the poor, racial minorities
(These change depending on location, BIPOC in America and BPOC in Europe).
However, the Russian, German, Chinese, Vietnamese & Cambodian revolutions had clear leaders but not the Progressive Socialists, there is no Mao or Stalin. (There is Xi and Putin).
Comparisons on how the "Art of War" and propaganda techniques have been used
by Progressive and National Socialists.
• Using current biology trend; the National Socialists used eugenics and the Progressive Socialists use transsexualism. (Russia has it's own history here with the Olympics + 20's Red Berlin).
• National Socialists burned books and the Progressive Socialists ban them.
• Hero martyr; Horst Wessel for the National Socialists and George Floyd for the Progressive Socialists.
• Both have re-written history; the National Socialists with the Aryan world builders, Progressive Socialists with black Cleopatra & black built stone-henge.
• Both removed Christian (or all religious) imagery from social places, schools and administrations.
• Both used iconoclasm's to remove statues, paintings of the "oppressors" to install more politically agreeable artwork.
• Both used new holidays, flags and parades to carry message and to include schools and all public spaces. (Complaints & denouncements if flags are not shown).
• Both are anti-Semitic (There is a notion of the left wing in the UK relying on Muslim votes).
George Orwell writes
"Micro-aggression" appears to be taken from 1984 as "face-crime".
Reduction in vocabulary
Confusing political messages, George Osbourne saying the markets are going up when quite the reverse was happening. In 1984 the price of chocolate was lowered (increased) to a higher value than before the price change.
Lessons in Propaganda. Russian Active Measures and it's aim;
Active measures (активные мероприятия) Ideological subversion aimed to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
(This has been operating since 1922 under Stalin. It came back in 1959 with Khrushchev and was put into warp speed in 2001).
Ideological Subversion. "It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralise a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism, Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or contra-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism." - Yuri Bezmenov (KGB).
The long march through the institutions.
The methodology is to use a process of :
• Demoralisation (20 years, started 2001)
• Destabilisation (started 2021)
• Crisis (TBD)
• Normalisation (TBD)
To subdue the enemy nation from the inside.
If Russia makes any movement into NATO would we go to war for Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia? China with Taiwan? How far can they push the boundaries.
If we do, do the men have the fighting spirit and patriotism of previous generations?
No.
The misandry is far and wide in the west through ideological subversion, the culture degenerate and perverse. White men feel excluded from years of DEI and have no place in their home or home country. Don't expect blue collar workers to fight fully committed. This is the whole point. To subdue the enemy nation from the inside.
Ideological subversion created havoc in the Russian army of the first world war to set the stage for the civil war and revolution.
It mentions in Dr Zhivago (about 70 mins) the unhappy men in Russia went to war. Why unhappy? Years of feminism and ideological subversion.
The Devils by Dostoevsky describes blue spectacle wearing individuals saying 2+2=5 because it made them sound more interesting.
Perceived Aims of Progressive Socialism
• Weaken the men
• Empower the women
• Make heterosexuality the perversity
• Conditioned reaction to events.
• Limit free speech for safety
• Promote abortion and euthanasia.
• To bring in a political change?
I don't believe this political movement was meant to succeed but to bring a new totalitarianism more in line with Russia and China. Their influence is being felt around the world with BRICS and the Belt and Road project.
Edward Gibbons Quote
The most worthless in society are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character or station to justify the partial distinction.
4) Previous civilisations
Five signs for the end of a civilisation
Displays of affluence.
Sex and perversion of sex.
Art, freakish and sensational.
Wealth gap.
Increased demand to live off the state.
x) Money
Gold
Promise
Notes
Fiat
x) Economics
Ricardo, Any money you give the poor will always result in more poor
Malthus, reduction of people through war, famine or natural disaster.
Sumner
Marx
Keynes
Friedman
Today (Steve Keen, Mark Blyth)
There's a lot more on this, a lot of heading above.
There is a whole religious piece, Gospels (MMLI) the next 1453 (2031) Psalms and the Proverbs. Essenes Revelations, life of Jesus vs story of Jesus, Essenes vs Paul, Pistas Sophia & the three initiates.
And your solution is?
The UK is on a war footing, Belgium are drafting, then ineveitably step by step as anyone using these technique knows, war. I'll wait it out and not join in the game.
Wise man. I intend to play another game entirely in order to stop this game in its tracks. Everything will be revealed later when all my resources are deployed and released simultaneously.
I’ve just started reading Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring - which is a history of the 1848 revolutions. I highly recommend you give it a go too.
Here's the link to the Pharos lecture DC gave a day or two ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdqRRapzCqs
1. DC admitted that Reform and Farage are what I've been saying they are for months now - just another iteration of the Liberal Establishment. So no future there for DC's ideas. Meet the 'new' party; same as the old parties.
2. As DC discounts the Tories and Labour parties as parties with no future, he hasn't got anyone in prospect to deliver his (DC's) agenda. People first ...
3. DC's interlocutor queried him as to whether 'democracy' has a future at 1.17 and got an unclear answer. Neither man showed any awareness of the success of Swiss Direct Democracy in solving every problem that afflicts every other Western and non-Western country in the present era.
I must say Dominic, I watched your recent talk via Pharos Foundation and I think you may have found your fulcrum of leverage.
Critical appraisal paired with radical common sense.
If you can persist with these appearances, you will shift the political appetite in a compound way, slow at first then much faster. You might have to repeat yourself a lot on the way, but all the right people are listening to this school of thought.
I think the UK is approaching a time where people just want the trains to run on time, just want interest rates to be low, just want schools to teach their kids english and maths literacy, just want houses to cost what the bricks cost, just want the government to “fuck off and do your job”.
Whether we get there by 2029, or later, I’m not so sure?
But your broader framing is very good.
Here is the old environment
These are the systems we developed for the old environment (or that emerged).
These systems did very well for a while in their intended environment.
But now something has changed. Something is broken. We all see it. We know this because our old systems that used to be good, are now failing.
Here is how the environment has changed, or the previously good system broke down.
Now we are stranded or going backwards (see two decades of lost growth).
These are the systems and architecture we need to explore in order to adapt well and recover our former status / position in the world.
Having written the above I realise there are some important pivots to establish.
I think some important questions to ask yourself are:
Did we design our old (current) system because we were smart? Or did they emerge because we were flexible back then, and we have since ossified (good things stopped emerging)?
Why are these existing systems failing now? Has the environment changed (the media has), or are the systems ossified and corrupted (did good systems rot?) Probably some combo of both but should be able to articulate the nuance.
How do we change/adapt our system going forward? Do we try and design and impose a solution, or do we de-ossify (cut out the rot and plant seeds) and let system components compete and the best component solution to emerge?
For our long term benefit how do we either a) inoculate for ossification in an intended emergent system or b) ensure future adaptation reviews of an imposed design system?
Now I think the emergent path is very much a Western school of long term strategy, and the imposed designed system is very much an Eastern strategy.
In recent years the Eastern approach has enjoyed more success, but I don’t think that means it is superior. I just don’t think the West has operated its historical strategic emergence M.O. in a very thoughtful manner. Again that doesn’t mean to say emergence is superior either, but I think freedom and institutional emergence are pretty much the same thing. So personally, I instinctively feel we should probably go that way.
"Why are these existing systems failing now?"
Boyd's trinity tells us that the quality of the people are the beginning and end of all complex systems. No process, no algorithm, no policy package, no balance of competing interests can accept an influx of corrupt, dishonest charlatans and function to the benefit of society. The mountain of red tape that has appeared to attempt to handle the growing dishonesty that is endemic in the system has transparently failed. DC's original vision for ARIA rested on a foundation of assumed rock-solid integrity from the executive board and grant applicants. I don't see that environment around me today. The high trust and high integrity society that existed within the UK and the USA in the mid 20th century is no longer here. The mass importation of people from low-trust cultures has permanently nuked this prerequisite for a functioning advanced research agency.
Lies and dishonesty have saturated the institutions to the point where nothing functions any more. I think this points to a metaphysical malady, because truth is a metaphysical property.
In the prior post on Strauss, DC observes:
"freedom of speech includes the right to lie: all lies are immoral but also mostly legal"
The Enlightenment is what brought us to this point. The secular model of government, decoupled from the standards of morality as set out by Christ, has inevitably augured into the floor and achieved levels of wickedness and malice that cannot be plausibly denied. Every man is free to decide for himself what his morality will be that day and here we are, shocked! shocked! that complex systems that rely on honesty, integrity and truthfulness are failing to function.
The churches are empty. The people have turned their backs on Christ. There is no secular system that can convert this slurry into gold. The King has the authority to conduct an inquisition and purge the Church of England of apostates, but he chooses not to. So here we sit. As President Bukele stated, the spiritual war decides the material war, not the other way around - and he has the results to back his claim.
Here's DC's Sky News hour-long interview from two days ago. It's amassed over a hundred thousand views in these two days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaUixccGK7s
17.11Mins: '' ... they're optimising for what the system wants instead of optimising for what the voters want ...".
So it's the political "system" versus " what the voters want" - i.e. the political ''system" versus democracy. This is the distinction I always draw, yet DC and everyone else do not. Why do DC and everyone else fail to draw this distinction? That's easy. They are parts of the anti-democratic political "system", which is why they cannot see that Swiss Direct Democracy is the obvious solution to the anti-democracy of the political "system" they criticise.
Minor correction - the excellent David Betz podcast with the even more excellent Louise Perry is on the coming cvi WAR, not civil violence. Seems an important clarification! He spends the last ten minutes or so discussing that
a. it's inevitable
b. the best thing anyone can do is prepare for it.
The whole thing is horrifying. He is a long long way from some kind of survivalist crank.
DOMINIC CUMMINGS YOU HAVE GIVEN ME NO CHOICE BUT TO WRITE A CRINGEWORTHY DISS TRACK ON YOU!!!!!!
“Take back control”,
that was your slogan last time,
Was that about the EU,
or your receding hairline?
You’re reviled by liberals,
seen as the rise of fascism,
But I see your clothes on the news and am like -
“he’s a crime against fashion” (https://images.app.goo.gl/Qs2WGEs5qPun62X39)
If you’re going to wear that kind of bling,
How you hope to save the West from Wang Huning?
You’re so insane,
it’s hard to believe it’s true!
We need scientific advice,
where’s Stephen Hsu?
This blog has buzzwords,
that turn us blue.
I see “OODA LOOP”, and wish Jolyon did a judicial review.
For all these years you called Farage demon spawn,
But now you tell your readers,
“We need to hurt Labour, vote reform!”
Can we get a PM who doesn’t suck?
We need a British Lee Kuan Yew, Not a right wing nut.
I know you like Thucydides, but that’s a surprise to see,
Like your last substack QnA, it’s ancient history.
You’re the best political campaigner, I know that’s right.
But you’re like a lyrical Liz Truss when you step on the mic.
Useless as Cleverly or a Boris bike.
I’m the Carrie Johnson of rap, firing Cummings tonight.
The remainers hate you Dom, you terrify them.
But I’m a bigger threat, like the UK’s broken procurement system.
I’ve so much power, like a permanent private Secretary of rap,
Do you like Corbyn 2019, wipe you off the map.
You won Brexit over 10 years ago,
David Cameron cried, and the EU screamed no!
But here’s some solace, for them to know,
report back to Brussels: “Dominic Cummings - just got publicly owned!”
….I’m just playing Cummings, you know I love you.
🇬🇧 is not my business .
However if you don’t fight you’re extinct is the eternal fate of men.
Extinction in your case isn’t a hypothetical.
Pleiades - The Gods were born when an exhausted parent decided that 'Thor makes thunder' was easier than explaining atmospheric pressure.
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AI's advance threatens to split elites into capital owners who benefit and professional classes who face displacement.
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Combination of Telegram & Crypto simplifies espionage :-(
Trump has added markedly to the simplicity of espionage by importing the biggest AI chipmaker (TSMC) from Taiwan into the US, replete with multiple numbers of CCP AI experts as longtime embedded staffers! Stupid is as stupid does.