I also suspect that model is a lot more likely than many realize. Particularly within the ‘elite’.”

Kirk,

That is my fondest hope. The problem is that in order for that to happen, there has to be that preference cascade. And for that to actually happen, the politics has to affect the individual directly in a way they can’t miss. It has to be THEIR job lost, the particular freedom THEY hold dear lost, THEIR friend or relative “Disappeared”. Most people who don’t own guns, don’t care much about the politics of gun control for example, or follow the anti-herd, because a gun ban won’t directly affect them.

I read somewhere that the total number of Gestapo in Berlin was only a few thousand, and that without informants and massive propaganda, they could not possibly have kept control. Same applies for every other regime. The technically best were probably the East Germans. The wall still fell, but it took decades.

Romania and East Germany fell, much as you described, because two things happened. One was that the Army/Police stopped being willing to shoot their own people, and the dissident preference cascade happened. For the second part to happen, the silent majority need to a) care, and more importantly b) realize that they ARE in fact the majority.

The secret to control in the authoritarian regime, is not to squash dissent directly and completely. That is impossible. Rather, you sow enough distrust so that the dissident is never sure how many other dissidents there are. He goes to the mandatory pep rallies and party meetings and mouths the slogans he doesn’t really believe, but he can never be sure how many others around him are doing the same vs. how many actually believe.

He can’t take the risk of talking to his friend at work about this, because his friend may turn out to be a true believer, or an informant, willing or unwilling doesn’t matter.

What killed the Romanian regime was enough workers dragged from their after work drinking to a “mandatory rally” were drunk enough to boo, the security police couldn’t get to them fast enough, and suddenly the dissidents realized, as the booing spread, that they WERE in fact the majority.

The regime still held on for decades. North Korea is STILL holding on despite famine and disaster. Sure, it can happen suddenly, or the regime can hover on the brink for years.

I don’t see people in the west actually caring enough. The frog is boiling too slowly. The economy is not bad enough yet, the repression and incompetence not severe enough, and the population too apathetic, bread and circussed, ignorant, and soft to actually rebel any time soon.

I hope I am wrong…..

Sorry to say Harry, that even IF I’m right,(Kirk disagrees and has convincing arguments), we are still screwed because the ignorance we have to fear is widespread and spreading…..

A quote from the most recent post at The Smallest Minority blog;

“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.”

I recently had to explain to someone what a “Luddite” is…..

Add to that, the extreme polarization of today’s culture and politics means that even IF such a thing as (relatively) unbiased media existed, it would be rejected by the majority on both sides, who much prefer the echo chamber.

The striking thing about our era is just how blind the people running things are to what the actual realities of their various situations are, and how blithely they piss away the real basis of their powers in our society.

The news media has to have credibility and belief as their capital; lose that, and they’ve got nothing of value to offer anyone. Bang, there goes their financial basis, ‘cos who is going to buy a newspaper or watch a TV show that they don’t believe in the first place…?

Academia? What happens when they debase the value of their diplomas to the point where nobody accepts them as being worth the paper they’re printed on? Ocasio-Cortez has a flippin’ economics degree from a prestigious institution, and every time she opens her mouth to opine on anything to do with the economy or numbers, there are probably a dozen more people taking careful note not to hire anyone else with a certificate from that school…

If you think of the elite as sitting on a bank account of trust and credibility, what you’ll note is that they seem hell-bent on blowing every dime of that asset on BS, like drunken sailors out on a spree. What happens when they go to draw on that account, and there’s nothing left? What happens when they give orders, and nobody obeys or pays any attention to them?

I’ve always wondered about that quote from Solzhenitsyn–The one that goes: “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?”

What, do you suppose, happens when the elites discover that nobody, to include their hatchet men, believe or trust them at all? What happens when they just ignore the orders?

I think we saw an example in Romania, when the regime fell. Didn’t end very well for the regime leaders, did it?

I also suspect that model is a lot more likely than many realize. Particularly within the “elite”.

There has never been a 21st Century before, but there have been many societies in which the rulers debased their own currency — Zimbabwe and Germany are historically recent examples. We know exactly how money printing ends every time — and it is not good.

The situations which are causing the US rulers to debase the currency are (1) the unsustainably huge & rising Federal Budget Deficit, and (2) the unsustainably large Trade Deficit. It is interesting that in all the noise around the recent Federal elections, those two existential issues were hardly ever mentioned — not by candidates, and not by the media. Yet those are the issues which will bring down the branch on which the Political Class currently sits so comfortably. Unfortunately, that branch will fall on our heads.

* The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country

* The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country

* The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country

* The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country

* Financial Times is read by people who own the country

* The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country

* The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

The Sun readers do not care who runs the country as long…

See, here’s the problem: I want to know what’s going on. I don’t believe the media, and I can’t triangulate between competing biases if none of them are reporting on important events at all. It seems we’ve been set back to the rumor mill. That works better for local matters than for national or international. And the lockdowns and fear are stifling the rumor mill.

I have a feeling big things are brewing, and I’m out of the loop. How can I prepare for whatever’s coming if I don’t have information? Trying to extrapolate from history is guesswork. There’s never been a 21st century before.

I humbly beg to differ. What has changed is that they’ve torn their masks off entirely.

I’ve been reading newspapers here in the US since about 1975, generally from cover to cover and all of the major dailies in whatever market I lived in at the time. At no point in that period have I ever observed this supposed “objectivity”, nor has there ever really been anything even remotely “conservative”. Even the supposedly “right-wing” outlets were always informed by the progressive/left outlook, and reported accordingly. I honestly cannot remember ever reading anything at all that was “fair and balanced”, and the fact that the assclowns at Fox chose that as their tagline is merely really dark humor.

The root problem with it all is that all of the outlets tell you their interpretations and weight the facts over just reporting them. Take, for example, the reporting of that supposed “OPM Breach” we had a few years ago, wherein an Obama appointee basically sold out every single clearance-holding American citizen to the Chinese.

Bare facts were reported, innocuously describing it all as a “hack”, and totally downplaying the significance of it all. No outlet, whether supposedly “right-wing” or leftish, actually explained the significance of it all, or the likely effects it would have. Only if you had some slight knowledge of the clearance process or what OPM did would you have any inkling of the gravity of the situation, and even now, nobody is pointing out that this breach is why the Chinese have been able to identify and trail every single intelligence asset we’ve tried putting into China or anywhere else in their sphere of interest. Even in Africa, American intel assets are being blatantly tailed by the Chinese, making it blatantly obvious that their covers were compromised before they even left the US.

Nobody is talking about that in the news, are they? Nobody is highlighting the fact that our human intelligence is basically blown worldwide by the Chinese, and nobody is talking about who was responsible for that happening. Care to guess why? It ain’t because the assholes in our media are right-wing, or that they’re even remotely objective.

Fact is, the US media has been captured by the left since at least the 1930s. Everyone going into that field either is or becomes a left-wing “activist” through choice or indoctrination. Nobody with even the slightest real “right-wing” viewpoints or outlook can even get hired in even the most menial capacity at any outlet. I have watched highly qualified, excellent writers and reporters go for years being unable to find work in any capacity, while third-rate hacks straight out of journalism school wind up being hired immediately, just because they can mouth the proper lines when interviewed. Never mind that they know literally less than nothing about the subjects they were hired to write about, and what they do think they know is mostly wrong.

The media is thoroughly corrupt, and always has been. It pretty much started about the time they started up the “schools of journalism”, and made them gatekeepers for getting a job. Back when, “reporter” used to be a mostly blue-collar job, looked down upon by decent, “educated” people. Today, it’s a field strictly confined to the academic-industrial bubble, and only ever tells the truth by sheerest accident.

Funniest damn thing I have ever heard is idiot describing Fox News as “right wing”. Yeah, my ass–Ever look at the fact that they only ever cover the same stories as the rest of the media, providing only a veneer of slightly right-of-center commentary? The reality is, they’re entirely informed by the left, and only ever report their same lines of BS at the same times they do. Not once have I seen Fox actually “scoop” anyone with out-of-lockstep reporting or story choices, which is where you really can see the bias. It’s not what they are telling you, it’s what they chose to cover, and what gets ignored.

Back to the OPM breach; anyone even vaguely familiar with the facts of what happened could have predicted what is going on right now with our overseas intel assets. At the time, I was frothing at the mouth, if only because I was one of the ones betrayed by the bastards responsible. Today’s news about compromised CIA assets is only one of the things that should have been predicted in the news about the breach back in 2015, and highlighted with particular attention paid to who, precisely, was responsible. Instead, it all got sloughed off and slid under the carpet by all concerned, allowing many of those same traitors to continue in government service. Hell, more than a few are coming back in the Biden administration as we speak… With precisely zero interest by any of the media clowns in highlighting or showing any of their past traitorous performances.

Sadly for the West, we’re being run into the ground deliberately by traitorous vipers raised up in our midst. Inevitable eventual outcome? LOL… Enjoy the decline, baby, ‘cos it’s a comin’.

What was useful back then was that you knew the bias going in. If you were uncommitted or otherwise free thinking, you could read a paper from both sides, “average” the result, and get something like the actual true situation.

The other thing that has changed, is that while biased, old school news was often fair, They at least paid lip service to showing the arguments of the other side. Also, they had a sense of right and wrong. If one of theirs was egregiously wrong or bad, he was attacked. There were certain minimum standards. Not so today.