I am reading the manuscript of a book and one of it's main themes is that among the most lasting victories in history are defeats. Thermopylae, Masada, Roncesvalles, the Alamo to name few. The most dangerous and unkillable thing on earth is a legend.
The other common theme in history is that defeat is often more fecund than victory. Many of the flexible tactical formations movies ascribe to Rome originated from the debacle of Cannae. Carthage lost in the long run.
You win the campaign by coming out ahead on average. It's interesting to consider the fortunes of progressives. Did they peak around 1998 and have they been steadily losing to Black Swans since then? Not just to Brexit and Trump but to Covvid and their self inflicted shutdown.
They're losing because they just can't handle Black Swans. They're too inflexible to adapt and the only strategy they have is narrative control and spending giant sums of money.
But here's the thing: there are many more Black Swans in the offing and their prospects are dim.
Of course I could be wrong but I think it's more than likely that we'll see another Black Swan before too long because of complexity and the progs will have less energy to meet each succeeding challenge and the metric for this is the deficit.
The left may think of DT as the Last Surprise but that's almost surely not the case. And each time around they face the new surpise two things are true. They have more debt in their pocket and they have to spend more for narrative maintenance.
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The decision to fight the 2020 presidential election counts to the last legal motion may not stop Biden from acceding to the WH but it will succeed in exposing cheating allegations. A significant % of the US and world will or already have concluded the election was stolen.
As Roger Simon said: "It’s an actual guarantee of chaos—and that’s what we had and have. No one will ever really know what happened."
Paradoxically it is easier for a clearly dominant player to warp the process in his favor than it is for a party at near parity or slight inferiority to attempt the same. If you try a fast one on someone as big or actually bigger than you it becomes very risky.
Maybe your best bet is your original idea: to create a self-governing society on Mars.
The other option is raise the new banner on a virtual, internal planet, which exists on earth but is a world unto itself, like the fancy hotel John Wick goes to.
Steve Bannon Twitter account suspended. Progressives will probably unleash some degree of reprisal against their foes. When you're described as "conspiracy theorist", "racist", "dangerous", "inflammatory" that's probably a hint.
Terms like this can be thought of as the pixels of the narrative. They are the units of conception deeper than which the reader is not supposed to go. The media prides itself in being nuanced but how often do they think in cartoons?
The biggest downside to censorship, shadow banning and other methods of distortion and thought control is it destroys information. This is one of the fundamental reasons why the progs do so badly against Black Swans.
Even if Trump loses the strategic victory has already gone to the populists. The progressives have neither the money, the unity nor remaining moral capital to build their fantastic future. All they can do is winter with their poisoned chalice.
They have to face China, which they are quite unprepared to do, the devastation of their own lockdown, the burden of their promises to the radical wing, the conniving of their factions. Plus their media arm will never be the same again. Where do they go? Where do they go?
Paradoxically it is often better to suffer a tactical loss in exchange for a strategic gain, not in the least because people learn more in adversity than in the glut of victory.
If elections were a war the progressive counteroffensive aimed at sweeping the House, Senate and WH has failed. Despite enormous cost the line has essentially not budged.
In this context continuing the progressive offensive through ballot harvesting risks disaster because it is overwhelmingly likely to make things inconceivably worse.
When you smell gas don't light a match to find the leak.
"Let me tell you about the very rich.They are different from you and me.They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful,in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."
Easy pickings for clever, ruthless Chinese Communists who have not yet lost the hungry edge.