The Empty Fortress
Today it's Stratagem 32:
The Empty Fortress虚者虛之，疑中生疑，剛柔之際，奇而複奇。Those who are empty, empty it. Create uncertainty inside uncertainty. Between hard and soft, be strange and strange again.虛虛實實，兵無常勢。虛而示虛，諸葛而後，不乏其人。如吐蕃陷瓜州，王君焕死，河西恟懼。以張守珪為瓜州刺史，領餘眾方複築州城。版乾裁立，敵又暴至。略無守禦之具，城中相顧失色，莫有鬥志。守珪曰：“徒眾我寡，又瘡痍之後，不可以矢石相持，須以權道制之。”乃於城上，置酒作樂，以會將士。敵疑城中有備，不敢攻而退。 又如齊祖珽為北徐州刺史。至州，會有陳寇，百姓多反。珽不關城門。守陴者皆令下城，靜座街巷，禁斷行人，雞犬不亂鳴吠。賊無所見聞，不測所以，或疑人走城空，不設警備。珽複令大叫，鼓譟聒天，賊大驚，登時走散。Empty or full [weak or strong], there are no constants in warfare. Of weak armies who show openly their weakness, ever since Zhuge Liang, there have been many.For example when the Tibetans conquered Guazhou [in 776], Wang Junhuan died, and the West edges of the Yellow River all fell into panic. Zhang Shougui, governor of Guazhou, took the remainer population and started to build a new fortress. With the scaffolding for the walls was just finished the enemy attached again.They had no means of defense, and everyone immediately turned pale, with no will to fight. Wang then gave a speech: "The enemy are many, and we are few. We've just survived a defeat, we can't fight again with arrows and stones, we must use other means to defeat them". Saying this he went to the top of the fortress, served some wine, played some music, and held a banquet with his soldiers. The enemy on seeing this thought the fortress was well prepared, so they retreated.Or like Zu Ting of the Northern Qi, governor of Xuzhou. On arriving to his post, he found enemy troops from the Chen Dynasty, and many peasant rebellions. Zu ordered to let the city gates unshut, and have all the defendors go downtown and sit quietly in the alleys, while forbidding people from walking around and making sure roosters and dogs made no noise. When the enemy arrived they saw the open gates but nobody in the streets, not knowing why, with some suspecting perhaps everyone had left and the city was empty and undefended. At that moment Zu loudly shouted commands, the war drums blasted their sound up to heaven. The enemies, frightened, scattered away immediately.
Commentary: This is a bit of a stretched metaphor, but in a sense we're already running an empty fortress trick, and we have for a long time. Just that it's not we running the trick, but us being forced to.
The Left is strong and has dominated most wings of government for centuries. Their rhetoric however makes them repeat the mantra that they are the underdog, the weak and vulnerable, while the right is this scary mass of violent power, eager to attack them at any time.
In ancient war, the most important thing was discipline. If an army kept formation and obeyed orders, 9 times out of 10 they were pretty much invincible. Most deaths were not during battles, but after one side had lost cohesion and scattered troops could be hunted down easily by the victors. In that circumstance numbers didn't really matter. Scattered troops running away are useless, whether there's one thousand of one million of them.
Hence the scariest thing for an army commander was being ambushed and caught by surprise. Showing yourself to the enemy to be too weak just doesn't make sense: you're basically begging them to attack and kill you. The only rational explanation is that it's a trap, and traps are dangerous. So it's a neat trick to use, assuming the enemy doesn't have good information of your strength, and you have the massive balls to pull it off.
Does the Left have good information on the Right's strength? They surely have, but can they use it? The truth is highly inconvenient for them. They're always pretending that any affront on the right will unleash a "violent backlash" by the fierce right wing masses. Which don't really exist anymore. But they need them to exist. So the Right is kept alive, barely, left to exist not because of mercy, but to be forced to play a part in the Left's running LARP.
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This is a test test2 test3
The left will always require a right to occasionally win elections otherwise the complete scam of democracy would be too obvious for the normies to ignore. But the right that wins will not be right-wing in any meaningful sense (see RINOs), they will effectively be a slightly more moderate version of whatever leftist party they ran against. The only thing the left has to fear at this point in time where their power has been firmly cemented is that they boil the frog (as in the normies) too fast. The leftist spiral spiraling out of control and bringing the whole system down with it, which it inevitably will.
Kinda stumbling explaining this one huh? That's because the stratagem makes the implicit assumption of warring sides sharing the same values. In this case it's just chinese feudals exchanging the lands and slaves, so the armies only had to do bare minimum of fighting to justify continuous taxation. But in case of ethnic and/or ideological conflicts these faggy mindgames wouldn't matter, since the one side is bent on completely destroying the other.
>So the Right is kept alive, barely, left to exist not because of mercy, but to be forced to play a part in the Left's running LARP. Yeah, like Newbug saying that if the justification of the regime is that they are protecting people from dragons, then it is stupid to try looking like a dragon. But it is intra-Right signalling, how else one signals being a dissident to other dissidents than by looking a bit like a dragon? 10 yars ago I did not care about race and HBD at all. Because it is not relevant for Central/Eastern Europe in practice. You only need it in practice when you are running out of cultural explanations. As long as the culture of $minority is so that they are not sending their kids to school and not making them make homework, does it matter in practice that even if they tried really the hardest, they would fail due to inborn IQ? So I had no reason to care. Yet, American Dissidents care, because they ran out of cultural explanations of why $minority kids do not perform well at school. Apparently they have already fixed the culture issue for at least subset of them, and they still fail. So for them, not toeing the line on race is one of the most reliable dissident-signals, both because it does matter for them in practice and it pisses off the libs. So on the English-speaking Internet, dragon-signalling, intra-Right signalling tends to kind of suck one into the matter, even when he originally did not care. The joke is, I ended up caring because I realized culture does not explain anything at all. Culture is adaptation. So it is two-dimensional. Like if the state allows one group of people to break the law their culture adapts to that, and if it does not allow another group of people break the law, their culture adapts to that. The other dimension is that some people do better at adapting to the same circumstances than others, and that is HBD. So either $minority really does have a better - for them - way of making a living than getting educated, then not sending kids to school is not culture, it is just a rational choice. If you look at $minority and you see them in expensive cars because the state allows them to sell drugs or something, of course they have made a rational choice. But if you look at them and they live in hovels, apparently they have no working Plan B, then not sending their kids to school is failure to adapt to the environment where schooling is a big part of success. And such a failure is HBD.
In short, the 'left' understands culture and psychology, and the 'right' is still trying to use logic and reason. The right isn't helped by the cuckservatives who are paid to lose, with spinning bow ties and harumphing all around.
Is Jim down again? Or did the feds get him? Read some of your posts. I've always liked Asian perspectives on conflict. But, I think this liberal/conservative thing has played itself out and the mask is off.
Another explanation is the left needs their troops to believe they are weak to keep lefties disciplined and on reservation. Fear of der ewige hitler keeps the troops in their psychotic break. Question for us is how can we best turn this to our advantage, or to the lefts disadvantage? 1. Increase the fear/anxiety to break their sanity/health, while dispersing to deny them a target, which may force them to attack their leaders or allies? 2. Decrease their fear so they relax their grip on us, allowing us to wriggle free? 3. Camouflage ourselves and join them, and teach them all to better parasitize the system so it collapses sooner? 4. Do nothing, wait and see what happens next?