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Old May 2nd, 2012 #1
Alex Linder
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For Showcase members: I would like each member to pick at least one outside media source and track it with regard to intellectual developments and their relation to our cause. Myself, I will track lewrockwell.com, theoccidentalobserver.net and alternativeright.com, to start, and perhaps add others later. Anyone is free to track these himself as well, and of course also free to comment on the points I raise.

Readers: First and last, this thread is about ideas. Finding them, analyzing them. Wherever they appear. 'Ideas' most certainly includes new forms, new verbal forms, new bottles for old wines; new and better or worse ways of getting across new or old ideas.

Wherever I come across interesting ideas relevant to our cause, I will post and analyze them in this thread. People are welcome to PM me any subject matter they would like me to analyze, and if it's worth it, I will.

Last edited by Alex Linder; June 19th, 2012 at 02:30 PM.
 
Old May 2nd, 2012 #2
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For example, tomorrow I will analyze this thread.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...e-culture-war/

The piece itself is of limited interest, but the comments bring out a number of points and meta-points.
 
Old May 2nd, 2012 #3
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Do you have any others in particular that you would like to see covered, Alex?
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Old May 3rd, 2012 #4
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Originally Posted by Donnie in Ohio View Post
Do you have any others in particular that you would like to see covered, Alex?
Uh...Counter-Currents, Am Ren, Occidental Dissent...stuff probably most of us read at least from time to time. But it could be something radically different - stuff on gold, cars, business mags, anything. Just sort of tracking it in relation to overall change and our cause in specific. Doesn't absolutely have to be a formal media outlet, could be Stormfront, for example. Or Majority Rights.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #5
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Going to make some observations about The Occidental Observer, but more about our movement and its thinking, drawn from the comments section of this TOO article.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...e-culture-war/
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #6
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The Role of Party Politics in the Culture War by Alex Kurtagic

It is no secret that White identity political parties have it difficult in the age of ‘equality’.

If politics is the art of the possible, a culture where Whiteness is anathema makes White identity polities not possible.

Hence, the call to conceive the struggle for the West as a culture war, rather than a political contest: to win the election, we have to first win the culture.
Will make a subtle but important point here. This writing above is wrong because it takes a conservative approach rather than a radical approach. The conservative approach takes 'age' and 'culture' and 'era' as things that just sort of somehow exist, spontaneously generating out of the ether for no obvious reason. It is very fun to write like this. Safe, too. That's why catholics and paleocons specialize in it. Kurtagic is neither of these, as far as I know, but he's using the same mindset and formulations. The right way for WN to approach it is to focus on the who and why that gave rise to this state of things. Keep the actor and actions front and center. Don't drift in on some nebulous 'it was the age of anti-Whiteism.' Things human don't come from nowhere, they're no weather. It is so, so wrong, and so, so common to treat political conditions like they are weather and can't be done about. But always true and pertinent remains FDR's "nothing in politics happens by accident."

This is not the age of anything. It is not the era of anything. It is not a culture of anything. The age, era and culture we have are deliberately foisted and fostered by the powers that be, and that means the jews, and they foist it on us through the mass media. Culture, in this age, means tv. Cable tv. The thing that households are watching eight or nine hours a day. There is no other culture in this country. Kurtagic knows this, but my point is that he doesn't write to emphasize it, he adopts the standard conservative method of just pretending it's some impersonal, overwhelming force that nothing can be done about. Always, I repeat, it should be kept front and center that all this we hate?-- it's being done to us by people who hate us, and those people are jews and the collaborators who serve them.

It has been said that one of the great successes of Marxism was in making his wacko 'scientific' vision appear inevitable. Well, when conservatives or WN like Kurtagic write the way they do, it has just that effect - it makes the product of specific men, minds and motives appear to be general, diffuse and ineluctable.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:19 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #7
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A culture war means that the battleground is not politics, but culture.

Victory or defeat has obvious political implications, and victory results ultimately in political power for the counter-culture, but the immediate object of the war is to ‘win’ the culture, to transform it in a way that makes political power possible, rather than to win an election and fire the incumbent administration.
Politics and culture are hardly separable. How are you going to change the culture without taking over tv? You're not. The media are political because they not only make culture, they are under political control -- the FCC determines who gets to broadcast the stuff that, again, is on in average American households the better part of half each 24-hour period. And remember, 2/3 of that period is taken up with working and sleeping!

Culture = tv = politics. These things are not separable and should not be treated as if they were.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:19 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #8
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Without a political branch serving as interface between intellectuals and the public, without organisation designed to put ideas into practice, the intellectual counter-culture, however necessary or meritorious, would make itself irrelevant, the realm of a cerebral minority burrowed deep in the catacombs of academia.

Having said this, by their nature, the function of counter-cultural party politics differs from that of their establishment counterparts.
If this party doesn't seriously intend to compete for power, then there's little point. What's needed by our side is power. A political party might be one way to get that.

What is needed at this time is a national party that is technically capable of protecting its inner core, and an inner core that actually amounts to a core: true, ideological party positions, and a party line, that are not deviated from. The right principles must be adhered to unswervingly.

We need an intellectual North Star, much as Piece provided. What we have are the most intelligent minds in White Nationalism mostly emulating the conservatives. This is wrong. Conservatives are simply fundraisers by another name. I repeat Sobran's words about professional conservatism: "it was all a game; a way of making a living." That's not what WN is about. To raise money, the conservative is willing to abandon every political position and principle. His true principle is to engage in safe, ineffectual complaining as way to entertain a slice of the electorate that goes in for such, and thereby to guarantee himself a good living.

True radicals must figure out the correct political positions, and line, and stick to them. By this they will differentiate themselves from the fundraisers. They will also be wise to differentiate themselves by using different language. This is something Kevin MacDonald has never understood, which owes to the professional deformation nearly all Ph.D.s undergo - they use conventional language conventionally, even when that language is loaded political terms. You simply cannot fight jews and use the term 'anti-semitism' and 'racism' without tweezers. When you do, you show that you are functionally conservative, even if your positions are legitimately WN, and whether you understand what you are doing or not. You can't beat the jews by using their terms. You must use terms that, to use an academic term, problematize the verbally settled. Make specific issue with every commonly used term, if it's a politically loaded term. Fight on every front, and create new fronts through our own verbal aggression - that's the way to do it. But what we see in WN generally, and at TOO specifically, is WN brain-deadly not merely using jew propaganda terms, but employing the stay-personally-safe-at-all-costs paleocon M.O. of treating the age as some mysterious function of ether rather than deliberate creation of malevolent jews.

What we need is a national, even global, party setting down a reliable political line. And as much media as we can muster repeating its positions, adjusted locally and nationally and internationally. And if we couple this with not sucking up the conservatives, and emulating their stylistic approach, but overtly and aggressively attacking them, then we begin to differentiate our cause in the mind of the public. And at some point, we actually get on the national radar. We are in competition not just with the ruling jews and collaborators, after all, but with the professional right. Which is made up of men much richer, smarter and with better access than ours generally are or have. Sucking up to them, as MacDonald and James Edwards routinely do, is precisely the wrong way to go. We must at all costs distinguish ourselves from the Buchanans, not pretend that they are on our side. If we treat them politely, all we do is empower them and fill their coffers. This is not really too difficult to understand, it just runs against traditional WN bias. But it is the right way to go.

Do you want to be the big dog? Or you want to fight with the other little dogs for scraps under the table? If WN is to be anything but online quibbling, it must take itself seriously, and a very large part of that means attacking, not befriending, emulating or in any other way supporting professional conservatism.

This point is so important I've written a long essay on it, in our strategy section here.

Last edited by Alex Linder; June 19th, 2012 at 12:44 PM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #9
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Articulate and popularise the counter-cultural position. If no one puts it out there, packed into infectious slogans and stomach-punching soundbites, the abstruse theories of intellectuals, however clever, remain consigned to the libraries.
Quite right. Just as important is having a disciplined way of ensuring these terms and slogans are used immediately, continually, and by the largest amount of people. This requires coordination and ego-subordination. The Whites have never even agreed on the need to come up with a mirror term for 'racism,' and only intermittently recognized the need to.

An example of a technically perfect term is my 'hush crimes.' It's not right because I invented it but because it works perfectly. If you had people with followers and stature beyond those at VNN willing to use it, it could veritably be forced into the media, as a recognition of an ignored but widespread phenomenon. If enough people use the term, over time the jew-controlled junkmedia would be forced to use it too, if only to mock it or in quoting our side. And when they quoted it, they would be forced to explain it. And of course they would prejudice readers against it by claiming the phenomenon it represents is a matter of belief rather than fact, but the term would be out there. But people like MacDonald will only use terms coined by the professional conservatives they emulate. Yet another fundamental mistake they make.

It's almost wryly funny that a man like MacDonald wouldn't use a perfect coinage like 'hush crimes' but would use the "it's really all about the money" dollar-signPLC used by Vdare. What could be more wrong than to say that SPLC is all about money - to reduce everything to sex or money drives is precisely what jews themselves do. It's exactly like calling jews nazis, which everbody at Lewrockwell.com does, even though the correct model is the USSR Bolsheivik jews, the ideological and often literally the bloodline fathers of the same jews they're sans-racially complaining about today. They'd rather blame the people who fought the jews and and their system than the jews themselves. '$PLC' is neither clever nor accurate. Morris Dees was rich before he ever started the SPLC, that is a matter of fact. The SPLC is motivated only a distant secondly by the desire to make money; primarily its goals are political. MacDonald and others who foolishly misdirect those seeking to understand SPLC motives are making the same mistake honest (sic) leftists do when they claim that 'corporate' media seek profits above all else, even when it can be proved by a thousand examples that they put politics above profits every single time the two clash.

If we aren't physically fighting the enemy, at this point, with certain exceptions (hero Breivik), then we must do all we can on the verbal front. This means never using their terms without bringing their loaded and prejudicial essence into question - and substituting our own after exploding theirs.

Politics 101, itz.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:22 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #10
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Pragmatism or Purity?

The idea that support will go nova if we adjust our message just right is premised on false assumptions: the problem is not one of style, but one of essence.
Yes. A thousand times yes. Have been saying this forever, and it has not been understood. Kurtagic gets it. His amplification is greatly helpful.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:22 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #11
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Obviously, style matters a great deal, and certainly more than truth, but more important for people is being accepted and well-liked by friends, family, or those whose respect they care to enjoy.
Here he needs to make a distinction between people forming the core of a radical movement and those who might respond to standard democratic-electoral appeals. If you're worried about what others are thinking, you will never drive radical politics, and you'll only join it when it's on the verge of winning. Remember: Hitler never got more than about 1/3 of the vote. And that in times of disaster when everything was on the table.

It really is like Damone says to Rat in Fast Times: If she can't smell your quality - who needs her? Appealing to the weak, vacillating and self-interested -- how can we possibly, given the dangers our cause will entail right up until the verge of success -- make any headway trying to appeal to these people? What can we possibly offer that the judeo-System can't better? Our is the ultimate case of long-term vs short-term interests. We must appeal to the heroic, to get activists, and to the doing-your-duty strain in the average. And again, this political fact should determine Kurtagic's verbal style, yet he uses the traditional, comfortable, conservative-thus-wrong "appeal." No, bub. We don't appeal to anyone. We are appealing. We no more have to sell our cause than a supermodel has to sell her looks. We just have to get it out there and defend it with our lives - mean it. Arguing it is the least we have to do.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:23 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #12
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Obviously, style matters a great deal, and certainly more than truth,
Controlling tv satellites matters most of all. That and money control = political power. We need power. It's not like jews are stylish. It's not like their verbal terms are super clever. It's that they have the media and institutional control to repeat them until one hears nothing else. We must destroy or take away their organs of repetition. Pending that, we must create and commonly, among ourselves, use an evolving set of counter-terms.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:24 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #13
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We must always and only make and use arguments that frame things our way, to our advantage. Any terms/arguments commonly found in mainstream political writing are skewed against Whites. That may be taken as a given, as a law. 'Child's best interests.' There's a good example. I bet you've never considered it anything but a a neutral, natural, objective term. Think about it and see if you can figure out which view it was constructed to crush.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #14
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Thus the way forward is to attack the morality of the system’s core value—to bring about a transvaluation that dethrones establishment morality and replaces it with another.

We know this works because it has been done within living memory, and landed us where we are now—what was once common sense is now reviled, what was once despised is now admired.
Yes, but this is not the big deal - the big deal is taking control of the real levers of society - the mass media. Almost anything can be normalized if it's portrayed as good and desirable on tv. It all comes down to who controls tv, more than any other sector except money, and the money is only important, politically, because it buys the media to hide itself.

WN must keep some perspective. You could be Jesus II, and if you're not on tv, you're not going to be acknowledged as legitimate by the masses of people. You're not even going to be known about. WN must make it -- and that means getting on tv. And since the jews aren't even going to let us buy access to their mass media, that will not happen until we have a real party, a real partyline, real leaders, and real willing-to-diers. Then we'll get respect, starting with disrespect, bleeding into fear.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:25 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #15
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In modern Western society the root of evil is the unquestioning belief in equality as an absolute moral good that is worth pursuing for its own sake. Everything flows from that. Destroy that belief and the egalitarian project collapses as malevolent and absurd.
Maybe, maybe not. This is stuff that agitates thinksters, not stuff that is of daily concern. Whites are getting screwed by the System. We defend Whites. Without shame or defensiveness, but with gusto and aggressiveness, verbal and physical. The anti-equality stuff is a longer-range mission that can only be accomplished in the ending of the jebus cult in all its noxious versions.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 4th, 2012 at 08:25 AM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #16
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Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”

The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.

Once the networks were built, the scientists then “sprinkled” in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.

“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan said. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”

The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. “There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion,” said Associate Professor of Physics and co-author of the paper Gyorgy Korniss. “Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”

The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.

The research was funded by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) through SCNARC, part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

The research is part of a much larger body of work taking place under SCNARC at Rensselaer. The center joins researchers from a broad spectrum of fields – including sociology, physics, computer science, and engineering – in exploring social cognitive networks. The center studies the fundamentals of network structures and how those structures are altered by technology. The goal of the center is to develop a deeper understanding of networks and a firm scientific basis for the newly arising field of network science. More information on the launch of SCNARC can be found at http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcen...tappvar=page(1)

Szymanski, Sreenivasan, and Korniss were joined in the research by Professor of Mathematics Chjan Lim, and graduate students Jierui Xie (first author) and Weituo Zhang.



In this visualization, we see the tipping point where minority opinion (shown in red) quickly becomes majority opinion. Over time, the minority opinion grows. Once the minority opinion reached 10 percent of the population, the network quickly changes as the minority opinion takes over the original majority opinion (shown in green).
Image credit: SCNARC/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

http://news.rpi.edu/update.do

Last edited by Rick Ronsavelle; May 3rd, 2012 at 09:31 PM.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #17
Alex Linder
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Originally Posted by Donnie in Ohio View Post
Do you have any others in particular that you would like to see covered, Alex?
You can follow whichever sites/media you like, but I'm also specifically looking to make a 'head' here at VNN. To create a strain or school that comes to 'take over' WN - be the leading and representative strain within by beating down all contenders. So we want to dig up and munge to second death bad ideas advocated by fellow WN. Erm...so to speak.
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #18
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Originally Posted by Rick Ronsavelle View Post
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
What if the beliefs are contradictory? Do people believe both?

How do you define unshakeable belief?
 
Old May 3rd, 2012 #19
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The main point is the 10% tipping point. Less than that is useless, more is success. The target is 10% then progress becomes automatic.
 
Old May 4th, 2012 #20
Alex Linder
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Originally Posted by Rick Ronsavelle View Post
The main point is the 10% tipping point. Less than that is useless, more is success. The target is 10% then progress becomes automatic.
I don't know. The whole thing seems circular and dubious. If 80% of whites relocate to whiter areas when they move, then it seems clear that at least 10% of them must hold an 'unshakeable' (which I really doubt can be nailed down scientifically) view that all-white society is best, yet we haven't seen any progress in that direction, quite the reverse.
 
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