Do you have games on your phone meme

I remember people laughing at me when I pointed out that worthless degrees will eventually translate to worthless wages. Part of the reason I ended up doing the military to government work was to avoid having to pay (well financially anyway) for a 4 year degree that mostly helped me recognize patterns and behavior better (and write grant applications). I think we will find offshoring manufacturing jobs barely translated into reduced costs for goods but greatly decreased the wages of the half of the country that college does not benefit (does not participate/does not learn there anyway) and making everyone weaker and easier to control financially.

The situation is a mess.

By design my Dude by design and your comment below supports a bit of how they keep control.

“others are going to see it too late”

but they’ll remember you. “hey, he’s got stuff, he can help us.”

Exactly…and it’s worked. “Elections have consequences.” And the American public has essentially told us that they like what we’re doing–per theBiden. Can’t wait to see what’s next.

So what does the Obama Admin do in response? They begin distracting everyone with identity politics.

They also took the old policies that brought about the “Great Recession” and put them on steroids behind the scenes. They never fixed anything. They papered over it, called it a fix and continued right on.

When you step back and look for a bit, it’s interesting how statistically inclined propagandists are. Fascinating how they gaslight people against each other and virtually everyone knows it but so few see the reason behind who’s being gaslit against whom.

They foment generational warfare (one of several forms of identity politics) not because they care about the specific divide but because they know, statistically, that it works based on media consumption and the stratification of wealth. For a long time (~14) years, they successfully got exactly the target of their strip mining policies to go after young people as the “root cause” when the young people were the canary in the coal mine. Those rents that Wall Street is now worried about have been doing the same thing for over a decade. You have companies that specialize in taking over areas and ensuring no one there ever builds the savings to buy a house because rent goes up enough to eat every raise those people get. These companies brag about this in their investment prospectuses.

Sure there are rich kids and poor retirees, but in the larger statistical sense the old folks have what .gov wants (property, mostly) and aims to take.

But it’s really sort of a genius move. The Democrats have known for decades that they greatly outnumber the GOP. This is why they pushed “motor voter” and things like Rock the Vote. Boosting registration was the first step.

The problem is that registered voters doesn’t equal turnout. This annoyed the DNC for 20+ years. Well, now they have found the key to that turnout. Mail-in ballots + ballot harvesting and it’s legal in 39 states. Realistically, all they need to do is convince the lo-fos to sign a piece of paper. They’re building the capacity to go after the old folks who’ve spent the better part of two decades asking to get fucked because the media told them to. Credit where it’s due, props to the liars for this one, convincing people to slit their own throats is usually pretty hard to do.

Overlay all of that with the whole race thing and they line up perfectly too. Interesting that. It really isn’t about race. It’s about going after the property owners and people who, statistically, have something worth stealing. Just like you don’t see a lot of home invasions in shit neighborhoods because there’s nothing to steal.

One of the reasons I consistently bring up things like a certain type of *money* that’s digital and issued by a bank that’s central (Fuck you, WordPress) is because the first place that will almost certainly be rolled out is transfer payments. That’s retirees and welfare. Welfare folks I probably can’t reach and they already are in a place that they don’t have skin in the game but the folks like “TTAG Boomers” actually have something to lose here.

And lose they fuckin’ will if they don’t wake up to very uncomfortable truths.

Truths like that both parties are corrupt as Hell and we need to select one, gut it and rebuild it to actually serve the people of this country. Truths like the country’s a laughable shitshow and they helped build that because they didn’t pay any fucking attention for 40 years. Truths like that propaganda works better than they can imagine and that it works on them too which is a big part of why we’re in this mess.

And it does work. I can’t believe the number of older folks complaining about the national debt in terms of “Our grandkid’s grandkids will still be paying this off!”.

LOL, no, you silly old fucks. It’s never being paid off. Ever. It basically can’t be. You’ve just heard the word “trillion” enough that it seems like a manageable thing to you. It’s not. The country is bankrupt several times over unless you’re willing to talk about cutting government [spending] by 90% across the board for a couple of decades. Will they take a 90% Social Security cut to save their grandkid’s grandkids? Ahahahahahahaha, no. “Muh Social Security!” is just a singular example of why this is mathematically fixable but politically impossible to even touch.

And the younger folks get this to some degree. I don’t know anyone <40 who actually thinks they'll see a dime of Social Security or Medicare and it kinda grinds their gears that old folks want them to be forced to pay into a ponzi that is obviously a ponzi at this point.

Ah well, maybe people will wise up as the real fun starts in 2023 when they watch interest rates on short term debt rise while no one wants long term bonds. Treasury predictions have US interest on debt service at $1.7T next fiscal year, that's on projected $4.8T revenues. 35.4% of the government revenues go to service non-productive debt. Yay! But don't worry, Biden's people have the master plan. They'll spend another $900B we don't have for… things and stuff.

Will the R's stop this or will they play along for brownie points? Reelecting Mitch to run the Senate augurs poorly, I'd say.

“convincing people to slit their own throats is usually pretty hard to do”

it’s easy if they think they’ll get to slit their enemies’ throats first.

“let’s eliminate property rights, then we’ll give you a share of that rich guy’s stuff.”

“ok.”

they have found the key to that turnout.

I’ll add one item to that, and it’s a doozy. Big Tech. I suspect they helped to drive the youth vote in 2022 and the overall vote in 2020 (for Democrats). No one’s even trying to counter that. I think you would need a highly technical investigation and prove that it was a campaign contribution. Campaign finance laws should probably be updated.

select one, gut it and rebuild it to actually serve the people of this country.

I’m happy to see others saying this. Building a competitive third party isn’t feasible with the current infrastructure in place. It’s a pipe dream. Both current parties suck, but one is better with more potential than the other.

@Dude:

I think the “Big Tech” issue is different than most people who discuss it think. Yes, big tech and social media drive culture and politics is downstream from culture. The key to the socials is that they sell their data.

But when you get into the voting issues here involving harvesting you basically need to target that harvesting. In some areas that’s pretty easy, just hit up the large apartment complexes.

In other areas there’s quite a bit more nuance to it and that’s where the arguably as/more important “big data” comes into the picture. No one in the GOP seems to remember Obama’s people building one of the largest and most detailed voter databases in history. That’s not something that they deleted. It’s only been improved.

Microtargeting databases like that, combined with scrapes of social media data (which they purchase since that’s how social media makes money, selling user data) allow them to know which apartment complexes to hit but, even better, which apartments specifically.

That dovetails with work I did almost 15 years ago. People who live in apartments are significantly less likely to vote in general than people who rent a house who are, themselves, less likely to vote than people who own a house.

My conclusion from six months of stats work on that was that higher levels of personal responsibility, chosen or forced, lead to higher levels of voter engagement.

But if what you’re trying to do is get people to vote (rather than just study the factors that lead to voting/not voting behavior), that work shows pretty clearly that if you can target a group of people in apartments correctly you can harvest their votes while the people who disagree with you remain apathetic and don’t vote.

So, if you hit the whole apartment complex you might dilute your own desired result by picking up opposition votes. With microtargeting you pick up only what you want and are extremely unlikely to be offset by more than 6-7% of other registered voters in that apartment complex because they’ll mostly do what they’d have done if you simply ignored the whole situation, not vote.

Hypothetical example: The result is that you can take an apartment complex with 1000 potential votes, harvest the 550 in your favor with repeated skims to get people who weren’t home previously or didn’t answer the door and the remaining 450 will offset you to the tune of 27-33 votes. Every time you do that you’re running a (I’ll just use the larger number) 550:33 advantage. That’s 16:1 or 17:1 (16.6 specifically but we can’t cut voters into pieces, at least not legally).

As you can see pretty clearly here, even if your skims don’t hit anywhere near max efficiency for whatever reason, you’ve got enough cushion to have a healthy 5:1 advantage from apartments and therefore a huge advantage in urban/suburban areas and therefore you’ve got the mechanism to control statewide election outcomes.

You can use that to buffer whole districts that are not predisposed to your favor. No fraud needed.

“No fraud needed”

thanks for that explanation.

I wonder about another issue with Big Tech. They could use targeted reminders to register/vote. They have a direct link to voters via their phones. We already know they use targeted search results. I’m thinking about them working on their own to drive the vote in a particular direction. They know potential voters better than the voters’ families know them. Something big happened with young voters this month. I think there’s more to it than the abortion issue.

Ballot harvesting isn’t legal in all jurisdictions. It’s a big issue where it’s legal.

@rant7:

Sorry for missing this earlier: “it’s easy if they think they’ll get to slit their enemies’ throats first.”

The interesting part of that question is how they managed to convince these people that other people are their enemies. Class warfare didn’t used to work in the US, hence the turn to race-based agitation. Now, it does seem to work with a wider swath of people.

IMHO, looking at who it works on, I’d say Ron Paul might have been on to something with that whole “audit the Fed” thing. The reason inflation is being talked about now is that it’s hitting “where it’s not supposed to”.

I’m old enough to remember just a few years ago pointing out how predatory rent works over on BB and having a bunch of self-identified “Boomers” say things like “Yeah, whatever. Cry about it. Get a roommate and get to work”.

Pretty soon that’s something they’re going to be hearing when that Social Security Check barely buys a week of groceries. Point that out now and you can almost feel the fear pulsing through the screen.

That issue’s been going on a lot longer than people want to admit, as I said earlier, ’08 didn’t actually fix anything. And now that trickle up poverty isn’t just hitting the “lazy kids”. Squeaky wheels, grease and all that.

@Dude:

Obviously they could do what you’re talking about but I suspect that doing it in targeted manner would violate both state and federal election laws. As it is, they manipulate feeds and search results in a targeted manner anyway but I think that’s probably a bit less overt because it requires user input and therefore isn’t illegal.

” Something big happened with young voters this month. I think there’s more to it than the abortion issue.”

A large percentage of them, particularly Zoomers, hate Trump, Republicans, Conservatives and you. It’s that simple. The issues don’t matter so much as the label that’s been applied to “others”.

What, you think that the schools are just teaching them schlong and tit chopping? No Sir, that right there is just the tip-o-the iceberg. It’s a whole philosophy that’s been banged into their heads and if they get past about ~26 believing it, the vast majority will stay that way for life.

I warned about that, quite specifically, six years ago and noted that it would take time to mature just like all well executed manipulations of the youth do. Even posted a link to a BreachBang article on the topic. Covered how to fix it. Since no one has even mentioned it since, I assume it fell on deaf ears.

What was sown is now being reaped.

A fine example of that hatred is the young girl who trashed her father at her his funeral. They didn’t show up to vote in the past. Maybe they’re sending out notifications to everyone equally so it’s legal. I have Apple news alerts turned on just because I want to see what they deem important. I bet I got over five reminders to vote.

After giving it some thought, the tech reminders could be targeting the young voter without specifically targeting the young voter. Those reminders do nothing for me and my age group. We’re going to vote anyway. Those constant reminders could make the difference with a young person who normally wouldn’t be paying attention enough or care enough to go vote.

I debate where exactly to go with this reply. Eh, fuck it, damn the torpedos…

Those reminders do nothing for me and my age group. We’re going to vote anyway. Those constant reminders could make the difference with a young person who normally wouldn’t be paying attention enough or care enough to go vote.

Do you think that longish thing I typed out on ballot harvesting is a hypothetical?

It’s not. Only the arithmetic is because I simplified it. What I describe is happening right out in the open because it’s legal in most places. A couple months before an election you too can be hired to do it. You even get a flashy tablet to use!

A smallish urban apartment complex of 200 adults generally isn’t going to have more than maybe 20 people, total, vote if you leave it wholly alone. The things I’m talking about up that to ~120. Now, you’ve just increased turnout for that little stamp of land by 600% and if you do what I’m talking about correctly you picked up ~90% or better of the 100 vote increase. At the same time the amount of increased turnout for the other party is zero. This is pure “ground game” with modern tech and better statistics.

The main point here is that done right, statistically, every time you do this you can count it as something like 0.9 votes in the bag for your team. Run that millions of times and you get the 2020 election.

In this regard this works like a casino. If you play against the house long enough you will lose every penny you have. That’s how the stats work. You cannot change this. You must change the game.

This isn’t hard for political operatives to do with a combination of stats on voter engagement, local demos, microtargeting, data from social media and a list of voter registrations. I don’t really talk about myself much, as you may have noticed (or not), I’ll divert from normal and say this: This is literally what I was trained to do by some serious people in that business and offered VERY good money to do. Happily for you, I have morals and had enough money not to need theirs. I’d rather stay on the moral high ground than take their money, which ain’t exactly a hard test since I didn’t need it then or since.

Here’s the facts that no one really wants to discuss, particularly the *cough* assistants *cough* “on the Right” (in quotes because they’re on the Right the way a tick is on a dog):

Democrats have had a huge advantage in registration for decades and they’ve known it. Anyone who’s glanced at the numbers since 1988 knows it. Why this is the case isn’t worth covering now, but it IS the case. Ds have been actively looking for a way to turn this to their advantage in turnout for just as long (since the Ronnie Raygun amnesty). Conservatives are just ignorant of this, because honestly, they’re ignorant of most things in this regard. They don’t pay attention because… well, they’re too busy not paying attention. Different priorities and whatnot. It also helps that the Left has failed to “engage” these voters since 1988, so it flies under the radar to a large extent. Not anymore.

With registration advantages all over the place universal mail in voting because mUh PaNdeMicK! simply allowed the Ds to actualize long-standing wishes without anyone asking nasty little questions about legality. No one ever notes that there was a carveout for “canvassing” during the “pandemic” and that ballot harvesting is legal in, IIRC, 39 states. Funny, that, eh?

Is there fraud? Yes. There always is to some degree. But it is pretty minimal. It’s not “Dominion machines” swinging the vote. This cheating is legal and in the open.

Are most of the things that most Conservatives point out as evidence of fraud actually evidence of fraud? No. Anyone who’s played this game, or even studied it seriously, knows this. They are significant deviations from the norm as you know it but they are not significant deviations from the mathematical norm at all. In fact, the D’s can probably triple their efficiency and therefore their efficacy if they really try. They will. They’ll refine this system. It’s not that hard to do, particularly when you’re unopposed.

Just like most serious .gov conspiracies, there’s very little or no dark shadowy illegal shit going on here. It’s all legal and out in the open. It’s ignored because it’s BORING to most people.

Which is why it works.

And then along come idiots who scream FrAuD! and make all the Conservatives look like exactly the cartoon the Demos drew of them. “See paw, know lion” and the Right loses more credibility with the public at large. This is particularly effective with the young people because their sum total experience is being told that “Conservatives = evil” and that Conservatives are about to start screaming about X. And then the Conservatives act exactly as the kids were told they would. Believability achieved because the ability to predict the future accurately is amazing.

This is how conmen work. They predict the future they’ve already set up.

Honestly, way too many Conservatives are acting like dumbass people being led around by the nose by those “idiot academics”. Even when the Right catches the Ivory Tower folks lying the Tower is already three steps ahead. They knew the jig wouldn’t last forever and so they prepped the ground for getting caught. You catch them and you look bad to exactly the target audience. Again, basic conman games. Not hard if you’ve seen them before.

And for years I’ve watched the Right falls for this. Trump was a speedbump because he didn’t act as the Left thought/said he would. They had to alter tactics on that and did so. And then they found a new “crisis” (or five) and didn’t let it go to waste. At that point they knew they could run exactly the normal playbook, beat Trump and put a fuckin’ baked potato in the Oval Office.

And they did. And the GOP still hasn’t cottoned on to how this has happened. The more the idiots in the GOP flail the more the grassroots becomes convinced of things like “fraud” and “controlled opposition” and the worse they look.

It’s an interesting game. It sent me pretty deep into psyche because every time I try to explain it somewhere other than TTAG (and occasionally here too) I get attacked for explaining it. Because, according to the Right, the only way I could know this is if I work for the Left which means that the only reason I’d talk to the Right is to lead them astray.

The situation here is fascinating in sorta the same way that cancer is fascinating. It’s true but probably not wise to say that to the patient. They might get a little emo that you said that. It’s a bad look. But it’s the people who find cancer fascinating are exactly the ones that develop ways to beat it… so you need them even if their bedside manner sucks.

At some point someone needs to point out to the Right that they’re getting taken for a ride and how that’s being done. The alternative is a one-party state run by psychopaths who manage their own guilt via virtue signaling and swearing up and down that this is for your own good.

Some *might* find that condescending to say. In fact, I know that some do. They’ve told me as much and called me some choice names too, as though I give a shit about their opinion. If I did care what they think I’d be silent or lying to them for profit.

Yeah, well, truth hurts and the truth is that the Right are not slick political operatives. The Left are. As such, the Right tends to be caught between the Left and, as off-putting as some find the term these days, “grifters”. It’s not controlled opposition.

It’s people selling you what you want to hear before you even realize you want to hear it from them. That’s what good salesmen do. It’s what they’ve always done. They help you sell something to yourself and take your money for the service. Which is exactly what someone like Sean Hannity or Dinesh D’Souza are doing.

What you need is a counter ground game in urban areas. It’s not a magic bullet because of other factors at play, but it will dilute what the Ds are doing enough to give you a fighting chance.

Or, you can just let the cities burn completely and deal with the side effects later. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The election game changed in 2020. Time magazine has a good article detailing everything the Left did to rig the election in their favor so they could “save democracy.” Trump is correct when he says the election was rigged. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was illegal, but it was certainly unethical.
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

However, there are too many unanswered questions and too much shady behavior to completely dismiss fraud in 2020. I won’t list the details because I’m sure you’ve seen them. Everyone has their opinions. I can’t say that Dominion switched votes. What I can say is that Dominion lied under oath about the ability to remotely access their equipment. Why would they lie about that? Votes did change in real time, but the explanation was that’s how the tech worked. Okay, why didn’t that happen in 2016 or 2012, etc? If it isn’t done purposefully then the votes would switch between candidates at an equal rate, or at a minimum they would be proportionate to the total votes. That isn’t what happened. It always heavily favored Biden. When mistakes were caught in various districts, they were always “mistakes” that favored Biden. That isn’t how statistics work, as you know. If Biden had that much support nationally, then why didn’t his election have any coattails? Everything we’ve learned about elections from the past 70 years went out the window because the game has changed.

If everything is above board, then why do Democrats want loose voting regulations? Why are they against voter ID and signature verification? Why are they against clean voter rolls? Why do they want to send out ballots that weren’t even requested? These are things that 2008 Obama actually described as bad. Why are they good now? Why does the rest of the world understand that you don’t conduct elections like this because it invites fraud? If election officials are so confident, then why do they fight outside audits? I think MI just approved a measure that made outside election audits illegal. I could go on for pages here, but you get the picture. Fraud isn’t the only problem, but it is a problem that could be the difference in a close election.

Okay, onto this ballot issue. This is very interesting because I was under the impression that ballot harvesting was only legal in a handful of states. I had no idea the opposite was the reality. I’ve only heard about it in a negative light. Obviously all you have to do is understand the demographics and where to find those people locally. The youth vote would be easy. You go to college towns, and collect ballots where students live. Even in red states, the youth are often liberal. They just didn’t show up to vote in the past. 2022 was different from 2020 in that regard. It was the largest youth turnout in 30 years. That means something different happened. I personally think there was much less fraud in 22 compared to 20. Too many people were watching. They fine tuned legal ballot harvesting. That sounds like a good explanation.

Speaking of ballot harvesting, Fox has a very good 2022 voter analysis. Everyone who’s been brainwashed into believing that Hispanics are going to vote for Republicans needs to look at the Hispanic section. The only group that favored Republicans were Cuban Americans. All other groups favored Democrats by a much larger margin than that one group that favored Republicans. Winning over some Hispanics in FL because they hate commies, and TX because they’re sick of illegal immigration doesn’t translate into ANY change nationally when you’re already likely to carry FL and TX. It is nice and notable to expand the base. Trump deserves credit for this. The most notable expansion wasn’t black or Hispanic, it was the working class. That’s what transformed/is transforming the party. Just like Democrats tapped into potential voters that didn’t show up, there are massive amounts of rural conservatives who don’t vote. It wouldn’t be as easy as an apartment complex though.
https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2022/midterm-results/voter-analysis

“That’s what transformed/is transforming the party.”

One more thing. The Paul Ryans of the party are trying to stop this transformation. Wall Street is courting Republicans. They want the old party back. This is very bad news. Transforming a party doesn’t happen without a fight. This will be difficult. It might prove to be impossible.

RE: Youth vote

Also check this out:
https://civicnation.org/about/

https://civicnation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/College-Student-Voting-Fact-Sheet-1.pdf

A couple of things since moderation kept this conversation from flowing and I’m sure we’ll continue it later.

1. I never said that any of this was ethical. In fact, that’s why I remained out of it and eventually threw in the towel on PoliSci and decided to go do something else. It’s not ethical but it’s also, mostly, not illegal.

Generally the rule here is that there’s no reason to break a law you don’t have to and, mostly, you don’t have to. So, why take risks?

2. Generally speaking, the demographics are not the demographics but rather dictated more by what you might call “geography”. It’s no different than how people say that cops are racists or complain about “anti white racism”. No, both are a statistical game that produces “easily visible results” in terms of race but the policy (or policies) driving this observed outcome are generally not racist. Most cops aren’t racist, they come down hard to areas with high crime. Those happen to have certain demos. But they’re not just looking for certain skin types or they’d police differently. They’re policing by “bad neighborhood” in general. Anti-white stuff is mostly anti-capitalist, it just statistically tends to targets whites who have money and stuff to be targeted. The race angle is secondary but useful for propaganda. It’s like the Jews in that regard.

Are their exceptions, sure. So many as to not be worth cataloging but mostly they’re exceptions that prove the rules.

3. The bit you’re not going to like; Honestly, I don’t see this as an election issue at this point. It passed that in 2020. 2020 proved several things that no one really seems to notice.

Government is incompetent and entirely impotent in the face of <2% of the population simply choosing to ignore the government's rules. They require better than 98% compliance of they lose control entirely. The reason there was no clamp down is because by the time they realized they needed it they couldn't actually pull it off.

Further, a SHOCKING number of people are brainwashed on every side of politics. The things that people can be convinced to, at least, put up with and later rationalize are insane. Completely bonkers. This suggests to me that *old-school* (pre-2020) politics and political thinking are no longer applicable. If history serves, they won't be for another couple of cycles.

Abnormal is the new normal and people don't tend to deal with that very well. Especially when it gets scary, which, more and more I think it will across a large variety of fronts.

And nothing will be done to blunt that because it doesn't serve GOP interests to reduce speed before the crash. Why? Honest men can debate that, but ultimately to people like us, it's entirely irrelevant. It does however strongly suggest that the gut/replace method of going after the GOP is not just necessary but also more urgent than even most of its proponents seem to recognize.

Which is all a long way of saying that even if there is, say, 5% (or more) overt fraud in the elections… I don't much care. Not because I approve but because I have larger concerns in tangentially connected realms.

There are far bigger fish to fry at this point and no mechanism to undo the elections of the past anyway. IMHO, it's time to look to the future. And if we do shit right, old *irregularities* will fall by the wayside and cease to matter. If we fail, it won't matter either, so these are not places to expend energy at this time.

Good info, thanks. On the 5% fraud issue, Biden won by about 40k votes in a small handful of dem controlled districts. I think change will be easier, and life less painful, if we keep that from happening again. However, the Right needs to be educated on the risks associated with extravagant spending. It’s still bad when dems aren’t the ones calling the shots. It pissed me off every time TTAG ran a welfare celebration post on Covid bucks.

“let the cities burn completely and deal with the side effects later”

that’s going to happen anyway. if the left wins, the cities will rot. if the left loses, they’ll burn it all down.

great posts, this is what the internet should have been all along. thanks.

“However, the Right needs to be educated on the risks associated with extravagant spending.”

Yes, and a host of other things. Not go get all confrontational about it with the older readers, but Boomers have been being led astray for decades. By design, it’s fairly difficult to get them to realize this. Ultimately the internet is a poor medium for transmission of this specific information for a variety of reasons including, but not limited, to the fact that dealing with education requires a tailored approach to the individual learner. Simply saying “Boomers are…” is way, way too broad of a brush which only foments more discontent and makes a large number unwilling to to listen.

Presenting the truth in a way that most people will accept it is not one-size-fits-all and such an approch becomes less effective the older the cohort because of their diverent experiences. If you note that a 60 year old plumber is making the same mistake as a 60 year old PhD physicist you can’t talk to them the same way.

The GOP always goes for the lowhanging fruit, which is normal human behavior, but most of the fruit is not on easily reachable parts of the tree and anyone who’s ever looked at a tree knows this.

This is why I drone on and on about the various methods of manipulation which are extremely commonplace in the West. They’re so common that you don’t see them anymore. They’ve become background noise. This is by design because the fact that they’re not easily noticable is at least half their power, as Meerloo noted in his book.

“that’s going to happen anyway. if the left wins, the cities will rot. if the left loses, they’ll burn it all down.”

I’d quibble this point.

IMHO, this is a situation in which degrees matter. You are quite correct in general, but damage can be ameloriated now making things much, much easier to fix later. It’s essentially the Perito Principle. Since 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the gains but you’ll expend 80% of the effort for the last 20% of those gains, preventing damage now makes fixing things later easier because your 20% effort up-front doesn’t have to go as far because it’s not making up for the losses you didn’t take.

I tend to think of this like an intervention for an alcoholic or a drug addict. There’s a window of opportunity. They have to be far enough gone that they don’t want to keep doing what they’re doing but not so far gone that you need a herculean effort to save them.

One of the things that Jordan Peterson points out, which I fully agree with because I spent some time doing this, is that most people are not stupid. They simply don’t pay attention. You can see this in the fact that “stupid” people often take “smart” people to the cleaners. Why is that?

Well, take a normal person and if you could boost their IQ by 10 points, which you basically can’t, you’d get minimal effect on real world outcomes. However, you can teach them to increase the level of attention they pay and where they put it, and since most problems flow from a lack of attentiveness this tends to have a real-world effect on par with increasing their intelligence by ~30 points.

That’s the functional equivalent of moving someone two full standard deviations to the right, from normie to borderline gifted. From substandard to notably above normal.

You can see this if you travel to other countries and get outside the tourist bubble. In the US we’d call it going to Iowa and noting that people are “practical”. Yeah, because they don’t have a choice. And a lot of that *intelligence* is just them paying attention to stuff because they have to. You see exactly the same thing in “3rd world shitholes”.

Urban and suburban people have a very easy life, though they often don’t know this, and they have no real reason to be practical because there’s no downside to not being practical. But if you show them how much easier the things they want/need are when they pay attention in ways they currently are not they’ll think you’re a fucking magician.

Ultimately, this is the root secret behind all “self-help” specialists and the root concept behind useful psychotherapy.

That strategy didn’t work too well at Ruby Ridge and yes, the dog died too.

To be fair, the “bad guys” at Ruby Ridge quite obviously didn’t really want a fight.

They didn’t want to surrender either, but they clearly didn’t enter that situation with the intent to fight nor did they really develop such an intent during the whole thing.

Harris managed to kill one agent in the initial firefight whether they intended to fight or not. Once you have determined that you are NOT going to comply with the Governments “requests” you’ve pretty much put yourself in a situation of limited options (1) comply (which you’ve already determined to be a non-option) or (2) wait until the Feds finally move on you forcing you to surrender or fight (they are NOT just going to go away)… Weaver lost his son when agents killed their dog and Weaver’s friend killed one of the agents, Weaver’s wife was shot “accidentally” by a fucking FBI sniper(?)… Weaver did finally surrender after 11 days in a cabin with his dead wife and their infant daughter. I guess the point is that whatever you decide the fuckin Feds don’t mind killing your dog, your kids, your wife OR your whole damn family to get to you so either give up or get down with it there is no “I don’t want to fight BUT I won’t surrender either” in answer to possum’s premise that he can buy two minutes while they shoot his dog? Uh-uh, he’ll be lucky to have thirty seconds while they shoot the dog, the baby AND him. They’ve got the good shit and there ain’t no “re-loading” time out…

My entire point is that the FBI is quite adroit at fighting people who don’t want a fight. That’s not exactly the hallmark of skill.

How do they do against people who actually are willing to fight back? History shows they don’t do so well at that. For example, “Baby Face” Nelson killed three of them in one go simply because he went straight at them.

You killed the fucking cat for doing what cats do? Couldn’t just give the cat away OR, oh I don’t know, maybe take the cat to a fucking shelter?