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[–]BerryBoy1969It's not red vs. blue - It's capital vs. you[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

It's a long read, especially so for the saidit/reddit folks, but it goes a long way into explaining who these useless fucks are, and why they exist at all.

YMMV, of course.

Excerpt:

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

~snip~

Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place, occurring in parallel to and building on the industrial revolution. This was a revolution of mass and scale, which upended nearly every area of human activity and rapidly reorganized civilization, first in the West and then around the world: the limits of time and space produced by geography were swept away by new technologies of communication and transportation; greatly enlarged populations flowed into and swelled vast urban centers; masses of workers began to toil in huge factories, and then in offices, laboring through an endless paper trail trying to keep track of it all; in politics new opportunities arose for those who could seize on the growing power of the masses and their votes, along with new challenges in providing for their growing needs and desires. In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.[1]

Rapidly accelerating in the 20th century, the managerial revolution soon began to instigate another transformation of society in the West: it gave birth to a new managerial elite. A new social class had arisen out of the growing scale and complexity of mass organizations as those organizations began to find that, in order to function, they had to rely on large numbers of people who possessed the necessary highly technical and specialized cognitive skills and knowledge, including new techniques of organizational planning and management at scale. Such people became the professional managerial class, which quickly expanded to meet the growing demand for their services. While the wealthy families of the old landed aristocratic elite at first continued to own many of these new mass organizations, they soon were no longer capable of operating them, as the traits that had long defined mastery of their role and status – land ownership, inherited warrior virtues, a classical liberal education, formal rhetoric, personal charisma, an extensive code of social manners, etc. – were no longer sufficient or relevant for doing so. This meant the managerial class soon captured de facto control of all the mass organizations of society.

As I stated, it's a long read, and the excerpts I provided barely scratch the surface of the information in this essay, but it leads to what we're dealing with in the here and now.

Worth the time IMHO...

[–]ageingrockstar 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

I started reading the article and nodded along to the first two paragraphs that you have chosen to quote. Then I got to the bit where he started making comparison to China, with China as the 'dark' society that is just further down the same path as the West. And then I said Fuck, another (Anglo) China hater, and stopped reading. Write from what you know and yeah, if you're part of Western society, please write and critique your own society. But don't pretend that you also understand and can intelligently critique Chinese society, because chances are very, very strong that you don't understand Chinese society, and can't make a good critique of it.

I scrolled through the list of his other blog entries and found quite a bit more 'China hating' entries. Plus the poncy, pretentious use of Chinese characters next to his name. All the signs are there that this guy is a bigot, I'm afraid, who thinks he knows something about China but is mostly projecting his own preoccupations and prejudices on that civilization.

[–]BerryBoy1969It's not red vs. blue - It's capital vs. you[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I agree that he comes off as a pompous ass in his foreign critiques, but he seems to know his PMC class intimately, and that's what stood out to me at least.

[–]ageingrockstar 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yeah, he writes about that topic well, and I was actually settling in for a good read on that topic.

I don't usually pull out the 'stopped reading at that point' line, because it usually annoys me when others say that but I really can't stand anti China/Russia bigotry from Western writers these days, so it really does cause me to stop reading. I did go and confirm that it wasn't just in this piece that it appears in his writing (indeed, it seems to be a big part of it).

In looking at his other pieces I did read and like the Tolkien & Lewis one (where's he's on firm ground and where no commentary on China intrudes, at least as far as I was able to read to, before the 'subscribe to continue' break).

[–]InumaGaming Socialist 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Over on Reddit, I wrote a post about how people are confused af right now

This gets into the issues just a bit.

It takes a HELLUVA lot to undo the seeds of weaponized idpol that people are given whether it's Sinophobia, Russophobia, or racist BS that people are getting into. The point of it is to have you singing Dixie for the imperialist order of 'Merica while getting screwed. That can explain this a lot. The ruling elite give us a target to hate (Russia/China) who are passing America in the multipolar world we're living in. America and the West are losing allies and fading as colonial power can't be grasped. What they're trying to do is have their hatreds work to get people on their side with lies and some of that has to be untaught as the lies of the ruling elite.

This is a primer but we need to realize that factions exist and people coming out with pieces like this are probably siding with the imperialist propaganda and it's to their detriment.

[–]ageingrockstar 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

The ruling elite give us a target to hate (Russia/China)

Came across this meme just recently that summed it up pretty well I think :

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbBSd5WsAUK94I.jpg:orig

[–]risistill me 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks.Better than most political cartoons, IMO.

[–]ageingrockstar 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Huh, what a surprise :

N.S. Lyons is the pen name of an essayist working in the U.S. foreign policy community in Washington, DC.

(source)

Oh, and look, he's clueless on Russia as well :

In your estimation, does a Putin loss appear to be the most likely outcome of the current conflict in Ukraine?

That depends on what you mean by a ‘loss.’ Russia’s military campaign seems to be going truly terribly and appears incapable of achieving any of its original objectives of disarming and “de-Nazifying” all of Ukraine (i.e. changing the government). On the other hand, Russia cannot lose this war in the sense of losing territory or surrendering to its enemy: Russia has nuclear weapons, so that will never happen. Instead, the only way that this ends is through some kind of frozen stalemate—like North and South Korea—or some kind of negotiated settlement, such as happened in the Winter War with Finland, where Russia was also badly beaten by a much smaller opponent but nonetheless ‘won’ on paper when Finland gave up a small amount of territory to end the war but keep its independence.

All that said, this is already a catastrophic loss for Russia at the broader strategic level. Even if it takes some new territory from Ukraine (Crimea, the Donbas), it will end up only with essentially what it was already de facto controlling but have been economically isolated and militarily weakened. Much worse, NATO has been completely reenergized, with Sweden and Finland likely to join. So much for keeping NATO away from Russian borders: the latter is mere kilometers from St. Petersburg. And Germany, Poland, and others are now committed to rapid rearmament. Overall, Putin’s invasion has helped unify the West and reinforce the ‘liberal international order’ when breaking that order was the whole intended point of the ‘special military operation’ in the first place.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/the-world-shifting-beneath-our-feet-an-interview-with-n-s-lyons/

[–]InumaGaming Socialist 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)