One thing that 'Bronze Age Mindset' got right that e.g. conspiracy bros didn't notice:

The role of the upper middle class in our current woes

It's not top 0.1% alone, it is also about the 10-15% below them

This is NOT a small number of people, it's in the 10s of MMs It really helps to explain the scale of the problem

While billionaires might be able to wield outsized influence, without a large supporting class there's only so much a small group can do

And this group has a lot of resources, a lot to lose, and their wealth went up over time

The "conservative" lineage since Reagan, gatekept by boomers and now their underlings growing into the grift of Conservatism Inc seems poisoned at the root

They are all-in on "proposition nation" nonsense in particular, and all efforts to reform this POV have failed They show more regard for foreign nations than here and shop a worn-out revision of history that basically writes the nations of Anglo-America out of the books

While at the same time they fully support abrogating the Constitution they pretend to worship whenever it's convenient

I've spoken in the past about America's "Echo Teutonic" cultural thing

I noticed it again in writers of our time - guys like David Stockman, Paul Craig Roberts, Karl Denninger

The kind that hates liberals/woke and neocons, but also hates populism, has a match in 20th c. Germany That's similar to the German conservative aristocrats of the Great War era

They hated both liberalism and communism, but also hated NS and Hitler, and even tried to assassinate the latter

The guys I mentioned, their hatred rises to that level

They fill the same social role

Interesting how much the worldview changed since the early days of FrogTwitter-

Then - inquiry along "forbidden" lines, helped by the more open social media at that time, now mostly blocked by threat of ban/shadowban

Now - resurgence of religion, with both good and bad results Dissident activity became much harder, especially the very fertile & imaginative way of early FrogTwitter, because of the thorough censorship applied since that time by governments, social media coordinated effort

But "Streisand Effect" made it more mainstream since that time

AI Deception Mindwar Thread:

Our pal thetrollbar (I @ him later) warned since about 2018 that AI was presently being weaponised against the commons

LAtely we've seen some tools finally filter down to the plebs -- at first imagery via SD, now LLM chatbots since late last year... These represent low output versions of similar tools that are available to organs of the regime; media, the intelligence community and so forth

The capabilities of these are more advanced, including generating volumes of fake news along with seemingly real images

A realistic take on the USA economy that won't make it into the fake news:

We have at least two megalith-tier rackets/scams eating up much of the product of the nation

1/ helfcare is a parasitic oligopoly that eats >1/5 of the national product whilst doing more harm than good This amounts to multiples of the ridiculously bloated Department of Defense budget that gets so much attention (well deserved I might add)

And 2/ an overleveraged real estate ponzi from coast to coast

Much of the insurance and finance sectors are tributaries of these

Looking at the difference between the "Apollonian" Classical world and the "Faustian" later Western culture, a major difference is performance and artifice

Look at the Jungian concept of "persona" which is like a mask -- this would've been incomprehensible to Hellenes To scions of the Faustian West, the persona is so important that the person to whom it belongs becomes confused whether they are the persona or the character underneath

With the Hellenes a subject and his expression were unified, such a confusion of identity unheard of

Do you believe that Providence or the "finger of God" intervenes in the affairs of men of action ?

Ernst Juenger stated that on several occasions, apparently chance events saved his life in WWI

It happened so reliably that he could no longer see these events as randomness For example he was in the Battle of the Somme, and had just been relieved from the dreadful conflict around Guillemont, for a short rest in a village

As he was going about his officer's routine he caught shrapnel through his leg, that hit from a nigh impossible angle ...

I sometimes like to go back and look at predictions made a while ago and see how they did

James Rickards had much to say circa 2014 about the coming crackup of the economic system

In hindsight, 2014 is when things got sinister

How did his predictions fare over time though? He devoted a lot of energy to the case of the twin megastates of USA and China at that time

The prognosis for either of them was not good

The US specific predictions were accurate, and the decline of the US is so obvious now that no one will be surprised by that

Public space in our time has been corrupted along 2 sinister or alienating lines

1/ Dense developments for living without commons for the use of inhabitants

But also

2/ Public space made total, digital Stasi society blurring the distinction between public and private life The dense urban or suburban developments today, you will be lucky to see parks zoned into them, and certainly not things like plazas/squares/markets, at least not in US

The closest we came to commons in urban/sub. was in the shopping mall, long past its heyday anyway - sad !

Since I was talking about philology recently, in regard to poor translation of key concepts from German philosophy,

I also realized that there's a similar big problem with words in same lang. changing meaning over time, sometimes innocently and sometimes deliberately obfuscated The problem is it renders the past incomprehensible if this goes on for long enough, and we all know that there are people who want this

A specific word in English for which this applies is 'race'. It used to mean a lineage, or a group of people sharing a lineage

I mentioned dysgenics (from war or downbreeding) as a major destabilizing and degenerating influence in the contemporary West yesterday

But what about migrations? Per Spengler these do occur at the civilized phase of every high culture, with the "fellaheen" or rootless mob ... But again in the West the effect is amplified because the Western tendency is more wandering and less rooted than in other previous civilizations

The Hellenes - that is if we can trust sources that came down to us - would go off and found cities, then there they would stay

A reader asked why I consider our conditions a depression? e.g. Financial markets don't show it...

I personally wouldn't use that as the only indicator. If something like 1/4 of the firms in your country disappear in 1.5 years - mostly small biz - this is very bad, no? I suspect we haven't even seen the worst of this yet.

Economists used to talk about "decoupling", well we've reached the point where high markets can't say much about the general state of the economy.

And also, the bad health of economy does not imply stock markets going down.

The 2020s are obviously setting up to be the Corona Depression years.

May I remind that from the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the onset of WWII was under 10 years.

I could see a similar devolution of the world situation in that time from here, with some differences ... To fit the changed context worldwide.

First governments will not admit we're actually in a depression even tho it's obvious we already are.

Second govts will not change central bankster friendly policies at any cost.

Third wars would prob. be intranational, but global scale.

Faustian pacts:

Part of conspiracyland claims there have been demonolatry cults influencing civilization for 6000 years.

This seems unlikely: the Faust tale's imagery is a good illustration of why.

Demonic pacts cause a rapid rise to power and equally rapid catastrophic fall. There would be no durability in such an arrangement.

The last regime that probably resulted from such practices would be NS Germany.

Many of them were rumored to have gotten involved in the black arts and the course of their rule would match the expected pattern.

A couple years back I was posting about feuds within the FedGov and, asked recently if I still thought this happens, yes I do (e.g. disputes between various intel agencies, though news of this is hidden fast).

My main mistake was to assume any of them would side with the plebs. To give examples, the military intel orgs had some kind of extended controversy with the pure intel orgs, and both Snowden and Assange were involved in this.

At one point the FBI and other alphabet agencies were incommunicado during DJT's administration.

Etc.

Spengler did have some good predictive moments, e.g. the huge scale and traffic problems of later 20th C cities.

He didn't quite grasp the sexual dysphoric mania that would grip the postwar West though.

The return of Gnosticism and desire to transcend biology. There was a hint of it in his later works that he sensed something was very wrong though.

He speculated that "maybe our civilization will be the last".

As in we'd do so much harm to both the biosphere and ourselves in the process as to preclude ones in the future.

The universal standard of peer review, so beloved by Reddit Man and the shills that flood social media today touting 'muh science', appears to have only come into use after WWII

Great age of scientific inquiry since late 17C, with all of its discoveries, did without it just fine It appears to have been primarily adopted as a means of bureaucratic control and limitation on lines of inquiry

On the other hand, it did not prevent the replication crisis in science today

Previously, I guess the main test of scientific validity was: can results be replicated?

For those interested in combat sports, it's interesting to note that when weight classes for boxing were first laid down in 18th cent. Broughton's Rules,

The limit for a *heavyweight* was 160 lbs(~72.5 kg).

Gives idea of what post-Industrial Rev diets did to human body And when regulation of boxing really picked up, you'll note the weight classes also differ wildly from the ones that have come into use in professional MMA for example

Which gives some idea how oecumenical 'enhancement' has likewise changed the rules of the game

One indication that there's still a long way to go wrt the NPC question is the continuing trust of the populace in formal education

We've all seen parents recently - no matter ideological persuasion - clamoring to return kids to the classroom in spite of what's taught there now Primary screwling in the USA, whether public or private (former is worse, but not by a great deal), is run like jail, and the teachers themselves often behave like sadistic jailkeepers - some out of conditioning, others due to being truly awful human beings ...

The soul of the Anglosphere's people has turned inward and we only desire an improvement of the wretched state our lands have fallen to

But the regime is mired in the fantasies of the past century & determined to force them against all odds, whichever factions they belong to ... I really hope the C-19 years will be a wake-up call-

The faction currently in power has been openly supportive of Maoism domestically, some of its members have openly discussed sterilizing the populace for years, it wants to totally erase local identities, suborn them to ...