The Journalistic Mind
Yesterday I wrote that the leftist media (i.e. all of it) can't shut up about the alt-right because they're fascinated for finally having a worthy rival. They see the appeal.
Another possibility is that journalists basically spend all their lives in Twitter, and our Frog-Twitter friends are trolling them so hard that their Dunbar brains are just saturated with alt-right people. And so they react. And react, way beyond the real world importance of them. It's like high-school kids talking all the time about their classmates. Of course they do, it's where they spend their whole lives. But it's all absolutely trivial in hindsight.
Here's some evidence of how journalists work, and why they're brains are basically on drugs with Twitter. This is a passage from David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, a 1972 book detailing how the Cathedral back then, the media and the bureaucracy, botched the Vietnam War because they couldn't stop sucking each others' dicks. Basically because everybody wanted to suck JKF's dick.
David Halberstam was a fairly successful journalist, who took a long leave of several years in order to write a book. He writes how hard it was to quit his usual routine as a journalist for the lonely job of writing a book who would only be complete after years of work.
The hardest thing I had to do at the start was to take leave of my byline for the next four years. Ours is a profession built upon the immediacy of reward: We graduate from college, and our peers go off to law school and graduate school and medical school. They have barely started their first-year classes, and our names are bannered across the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. They get their medical or law degrees, and start out in their residencies or as the lowest hirelings in a law office, and we are old-timers, covering the statehouse, or on our way to Washington, by now, we believe, the possessors of a well-known brand name. The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. It was hard enough to give so much of it up when I went to Harper’s, where I would get only five or six bylines a year. But to go from the world of easy recognition, from the world of the Times and Harper’s, to a world where I might get only one byline in four years, was a great risk. A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well? My friends, knowing my compulsions, my innate impatience, wondered if I could do it. Would I be able to resist assignments and stay with my project?
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[…] Find the Symmetry […]
> But of course fascism sounds good. That’s the whole point of fascism. It’s catnip for civilized men. "Damn, I just got around to reading Maurice Barres, Sergio Panunzio and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. These people were visionaries!" There is no fascist tradition worth noting that is still alive. Further still, an American economic nationalist like Bannon being presented as a crypto-Evolian - such tactics will wear out in an age of "alternative media". The best thing the liberals can hope for is an attempt for an ideological renaissance, perhaps a new Rawls. Someone to reinvigorate the think tank-press complex.
I read all that as a teenager. You don't need a tradition. You need a Trump to repackage it for modern TV. Alternative media is bunk, the people who vote still watch TV.
I've seen a few too many grandmas in InfoWars t-shirts at Tump rallies to completely discount alternative media. The margins of victory for this election ended up so close (few tens of thousands in a few key states) that there are very few groups whose efforts I would discount as having been irrelevant to Trump's victory. nRx, perhaps, if only through their own lack of effort. The alt-right certainly mattered, and the alternative media even more so. Even if they're delivering a combined 2% of Trump's votes, that's 2% he couldn't have won without.
Some folk cling bitterly to the illusion of control.
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
So, Peggy Noonan is not wrong when she writes of the Alt-Right, "They’re not numerous, they’re only loud"? Born during the late 1960s, I do not remember the revolution of 1968, much less events that preceded it. However, I have been under the vague impression that the revolution of 1968 had been in full swing in New York's Greenwich Village thirty or forty years earlier. The Greenwich Villagers were not numerous, they were only loud. Now, or at any rate until the recent Trumpening, the Greenwich Villagers' ideological heirs control the Western world. In a way, could /pol/ be the new Greenwich Village?
If the Alt-Right is "loud" it's only due to the Streisand Effect.
I like and respect Peggy Noonan (even if she would disdain to like or respect me). Admittedly, however, one finds it ironic that she who has a column in The Wall Street Journal, with a weekly audience in the hundreds of thousands, should name you and me "loud." As I recall, until the advent of the Alt Right, you and I were hardly free to speak at all. Noonan, on the other hand, was writing speeches for three U.S. presidents. I confess that writing speeches for U.S. presidents plus, in retirement, a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, with frequent on-air appearances on television-news discussion panels, is a good job if one can get it; nor does it make Noonan "loud." It makes her talented and brilliantly successful, rather. But come. We're loud? One gathers that Noonan more or less means, it's a shame that you and I must be allowed to speak at all. Noonan's is a common sentiment—I'll not hold it harshly against her—but it's not right, is it?
Yes, Noonan's right, you're mostly very loud (one is a very loud monster, considered to be venerable), but I read several of you and some of it is good enough to have made me vote for Trump. Mainly, there are the super-smarties like Eiricksson. I don't regret it, but nor do I respect him. He is not doing a good job, and it has NOT been a pleasure to get this revealed so stupidly. I can see now that it was to get rid of the dead wood that had built up, and to get rid of both Bush and Clinton Machines, he also had to win, but it was the campaign and early win-months that were his, not now. It was WORTH it, no matter the idiocy that's happened since. I haven't seen anybody write about how that sweep through was really all that mattered, because Trump just can't do it if he does nothing but punish and know how to be a showman. I know NRx is into that, but yes, you are very small, and leftists are not taking you that seriously. You're much too exotic not to read, plus admittedly there are these brilliants that come in Nick's blog like SVErshov and Wagner sometimes. My lawyer brother and I both voted for Trump because Hillary was death by Cunt Poisoning, but we are going to see if the corner has not been turned. The Trump Show is getting really bad, and he's not smart about fixing things that wouldn't like him 'god-king', like some of you want to insist he is. He and Bannon look as if drunks not yet attended to by the mortician.
I like this article because it strokes my ego. However, I am still not able to shake the feeling that, since honest-to-god democracy died circa FDR, the media is the pulpit-pounding agent of the state, not that the state is subject to the media. In other words, no real power. And if Trump becomes Trumpenkönig, it will be because he, being the reality-distortion-field Great Man gravity well that he is, reactivated the long-dormant democracy-derived power of the Presidency, power everyone thought long dead, not that the alt-right/NRwhatever flavor of iMedia was somehow responsible.
Oops, that wasn't meant to be a comment reply.
I think what the left fears most is that the ideas of NRx & the Alt-Right grant memetic immunity against the most dominant strain of leftism, progressivism. Bannon arguably being the most powerful alt-right brahmin in the world, the left better be scared. But what else is the alt-right selling? If it's fascism, its a pretty shitty sale. Whenever I see Murdoch Murdoch waving the swastika flag saying 'we have to learn the art of national socialism!' I cringe.
Fascism is plenty cool. But you need the whole package. Cool uniforms, mass rallies, manly songs.
Aah.
No doubt part of what keeps the whole package from gaining traction is that the US uniformed services have captured that niche -- it has actual state-of-the-art weapons and LARPs that it's not a complete tool of the Cathedral.
@Thales: Interesting point. One suspects that you may be right, but how do the US uniformed services of today differ from the German Wehrmacht of the 1930s in respect to your observation? One difference—indeed, a significant difference—is that the German Wehrmacht was shackled by the Versailles Treaty. Versailles permitted the Germans to enlist only 100,000 men. Another difference was that Versailles prevented the Germans from flying an air force or (if I recall) floating more than a toy navy. Even under Stresemann, 1923, it seems (according to Shirer) that Germany was using the Freikorps as active irregular reserve units on the eastern frontiers, in contradiction of Versailles. Okay, so there were differences. Still, even in the Weimar Republic, did not the army alone enjoy the best equipment, the most splendid uniform, and the highest prestige to train, confirm and display the warrior's valor? That is, even in Weimar, did the army not own your niche? Hitler apparently thought that the army owned it. He felt so strongly about this that he murdered his own SA leader, Ernst Röhm, to confirm the point.
Well i can think of half a dozen reasons to kill Röhm besides that.
I'm supposed to be the Nazi faggot, not you. Anyway, yes, for high status broads to fuck you while married. like that English Minor Royal Princess Michael, she's born Nazi, and you just have to be tall enough. I heard her speak twice at art lectures, she is as outrageously 'our Val' as the queen says she is, but she'd go along with any of it, was already like that, her father. She likes men 15 years or so younger, and one Russian was killed back in 2012 that she was fucking, but she was so courageous she didn't go to his funeral, since there was the Chelsea Flower Show, and she knows what counts. Very intelligent, though, that's why I went, wanted to see an English royal actually do something, and she was smart as a whip but frivolous, silly beyond belief, and did nothing but talk about whores, after which she's swish her own tail.
Did you read any of Nicolas Taleb's stuff on antifragility? The few thousand people who make up the alt right constantly talk about making the movement antifragile. If they're right and effective, the mainstream criticism is making them stronger. Two more thoughts: If you add up creativity and raw brain power the few thousand of the alt right are in the same weight class as the legacy media legion. Steve Bannon seems a bit too in love with female politicians to make all that effective of a fascist.
Goebbels doted on his wife too.
LOL
How did he square doting on his wife with his philandering?
Well, progressives need an ideological enemy. They define themselves as being antiracist, antifascist, antiright. So if there is a real opposition to progressivism, they attack it. If there is not, they choose the least progressive from their midst and attack him as a racist, fascist, homophobe. It has happened before, repeatedly. So I don't think much can be read from progressives writing about the alt-right, except maybe that the alt-right has been noticed. Most of them are probably happy that there is the alt-right because It means that they are now save from being prosecuted by their fellow progressives for being racist, fascist, homophobes.
[…] The Journalistic Mind […]
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
So basically they have the mental age of a small child.
Small children are typically healthier.
Every facet of "news" is addictive. Every form of "news" is a slow drip of vicarious power fantasy. There was no "news" before the dawn of the Democratic Age, real or imagined, and there will be no "news" after its dusk. The information loop will be cut. There was a great UR article on this, but after many minutes of valiant searching I couldn't find it—sorry.
The alt-right often engages in alt-right drama irrelevant to those of us who don’t follow twitter.
Print media as high school gossip but with adults. I think you're on to something there.
Good post. I'd add that center-left media has to fixate on the alt-right and NRX because they are mostly anti-democratic, and because the Trump wave was so (small-d) democratic. Because Current Year Yglesias/Klein neoliberalism is fundamentally an anti-democratic, technocratic ideology that claims to democratic legitimacy (despite Current Year Dems' mixed success in Presidential general elections and disastrous recent record in state and local and midterm races, Dems can always point to surveys of non-voters which show them doing great), it's critical to focus attention away from the democratic appeal of the other side.
You got this ass backwards man. WE ARE LEGION, they are a few thousand insider pinheads that crowd the dead air networks and censor everyone else out to create a false consensus. When they had all the channels, they could get away with it, but now with the Cyberspace connections where small and previously unconnected users could have a say, they have to hire dozens of pansies in Mommies' basements running bots just to keep up. Moral Majority or Silent Majority was what smart people who saw the real numbers of US and the tiny numbers of Them and put two and two together on this scam back in the bad old days of censored fake lugenpresse always said. In Real Life, WE ARE LEGION and they are a couple thousand byline poison pens with dickless cucks, fags and enemy playing the fakeout of false consensus. When the unreality is controlled, some people can ignore what their eyes say every day. But with the millions of unpaid people commenting now, the jig is up.
They’ll be Berkeley nazis. The same people, perhaps. Because people are just empty vessels, looking for a kick. They don’t really care who provides it, only that it’s good. I like to mentally picture it as dammed water. Who wins is who designs the best course for the water to stream in once the dam is broken, and then breaks it (or is ready to do what they have to when it breaks due to the forces of history) Even Matthew Yglesias, whose picture is in English phrasebooks to explain the phrase “his face looks like a joke” How many verbally-versed (to wit: suited to rouse big bodies of water and set their course)135 IQ and above people would the right get the chance to have in its ranks if they dispensed with this kind of... comments they are so fond of making the whole time?
You mean I represent the right better than the oh so polite conservative movement? Plenty of verbally-versed 135 IQ cucks over there.