The Rainbow Nation Fades Out, Ibram X. Kendi Becoming a Liability, A US Cyber Force? Myanmar As Potential Front in New Cold War, Inventions Unknown to the Ancients
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I wonder if secession is going to become a thing in South Africa. Western Cape independence has been a talking point for a few years now, based on how horribly governed the rest of the country is. And I don't really buy that Zuma's revolt has much of an ideological base - he's the historic ANC leader most able to viscerally connect with the poor, unlike the party's intellectuals, but this is mostly about two things: his own personal beef with Ramaphosa, and an ethnic split in the ANC. The MKP cleaned up in strongly Zulu areas and attracted very little support anywhere else. Since KZN has been in a state of low-level insurrection since Zuma was ousted from the presidency, that could be two of the nine provinces with only a wobbly commitment to staying in South Africa.
Funny that the cyber warfare people are afraid of the Internet.
They had total control of TV, radio, and newspapers in an Orwellian fashion for decades. They thought they could control the Internet and we saw how much they tried the last few years!
Here's an interesting article that makes good points about the end of this authoritarian control because they had to be so extreme about covid, the mask of sanity slipped off and we saw how our politicians are just puppets to big interests.
"As traumatic transformations go, the covid operation is up there with industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and for time compression it is out on its own."
"And as for the rabbit hole trope – well, I don't think we’re going down the rabbit hole at all. We’re climbing out of it into the light."
Yes! I call this the sequel to 1984. The party lost the trust of the masses. Look how they're trying to make us scared of war with China and Russia.... Meanwhile the oil and money still flows.
What a joke.
To use the Alice in Wonderland analogy, we were hallucinating in wonderland and now waking to real land which is much less insane.
In the old days under apartheid, Washington and London feared that South Africa was developing an indigenous model of economic development that might offer an alternative for resource rich countries. The US and the UK preferred to leave it chronically under-developed, reliant on mineral and energy exports.
Since gaining control the ANC have wrecked things. They have pioneered race-based capitalism while deindustrializing, with vigorous encouragement from the US and UK. The great irony is that in the decades after apartheid both the US and UK have imposed a degree of deindustrialization upon their own people while simultaneously developing their own preferred form of race-based capitalism.
Former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s 2023 book goes in the same vein about SA. The country’s energy utilities are grossly misnmanaged : jobs for regime flunkies, rock-like coal sourced at a ridiculous price, spare parts sold on the black market… it was amazing it produced the amount of electricity it did, and only shedded load a few hours a day. After almost 3 years of hard work, things were starting to improve, and he was poisoned and resigned. Dealing with the ANC seems like it was the worst part of the job.
Nationalism is frowned on by modern liberals. Yet they need things like US cyber command to maintain a nationally coherent narrative. I wonder if that contradiction will have consequences?
On cyber operations now being pivotal in both military and civilian spheres, Patrick Tucker says adversaries can "exploit social media to reach potentially billions with tailored messages and undermine trust in Western institutions, including the US military."
Jason Schenker says "the subjective nature of reality on social media platforms further complicates the US’s ability to maintain a coherent national identity and counter disinformation."
Or the people in charge of the US could counter disinformation by shutting down Kendi's operation.
And stop telling me George Floyd was murdered on the pavement in Minneapolis outside of Cup Foods. That would maintain a coherent national identity and build trust in Western institutions including the US military. Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to tell the truth once, than to tell a lie and then have to tell more lies to sustain it?
"Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to tell the truth once than tell a lie and then have to tell more lies to sustain it?"
Our DEI regime is based on lies. The cost and difficulty of maintaining them is its raison d'etre, its political formula. So no, telling the truth would disavow its legitimacy. The emperor is fully clothed, that deer is a horse, etc.
Putting all their eggs in the Tatmadaw basket would be foolish. Foreign meddling is like a financial portfolio - diversify in case the side you're backing gets wrecked.
"In short, it’s about the restoration of narrative control through techno-psychological warfare against the country’s own citizens." All policies seemed geared toward the degradation and control of Western middle classes - primary significance of Biden second term may be the planned environmental policies which will really put the squeeze on
I write to you today in a sincere effort to help you accomplish your noble goals for seeking this office.
That is to help you facilitate the betterment of our schools for our children and young people.
To do this, I ask you to make the Board meeting agenda and the data points behind them available to me as well as all of the other taxpayers.
Upload the stack to a server where we can read, ratify and or annul the elements after log on.
In a perfect world each paragraph must have at least three possible answers: agree, disagree, no opinion at this time.
Direct democracy is a growing trend, and many companies offer these services:
hosting, voter receipts, and a running tally of totals for everyone to see.
In this way Madam Trustee you are assured that you will always have the strength of the community with you when making the decisions that really do effect the lives of our people.
“[T]he digital media landscape has evolved, with individualized streams replacing credible national broadcasts….” Damnit, I’ve been subjected to dangerous malinformation that the perma-regime hates. Gee thanks, Niccolo!! 😅😅🤘🤘
"whites mostly voted for the DA and the Afrikaner dominated Freedom Front Plus (FF+); mixed-race people deserted the traditional parties to support “brown” and “first nation” parties"
The author seems to imply that the DA is mostly a whites' party. If anything, I understand the DA is a coloureds' and whites' party.
The U. S. and South Africa have something significant in common which is assisting the downfall of both. Both are countries that were systemically racist against Blacks that are now systemically racist against Whites.
"Will the viviparous ANC, still kingmaker after 30 years despite everything, cast towards its offshoots like the EFF or the MKP to keep power? Or towards the DA and its liberal-reformist Multi Party Charter? If the former, it brings either 51% or 55% of the electorate and what analyst Dr Frans Cronje calls the Chernobyl Option, keeping power in the short term but sowing the seeds of its own destruction. If the latter, it brings 76% of the electorate and possible economic redemption."
If a coalition with the DA is formed, how likely is it for ANC MPs to rebel against whatever economic reforms Ramaphosa has to concede to the DA, and simply switch parties?
If that's a likely scenario, then Ramaphosa may feel he has no choice but to negotiate a deal with the EFF or MKP.
They have a law against MPs defecting. This is very handy for Ramaphosa. But it doesn't apply to party activists further down the food chain.
I think the MKP and EFF have the advantage and also the disadvantage of polarising leaders. If either of them figures out a way to broaden their base, the ANC could be in even bigger trouble.
“The Rainbow Nation is actually a collection of fiercely tribal groupings that do not look beyond their own in-group.”
The kind of Rainbow America that Mr. Kendi is trying to create, and that his enablers also seem to want.
“… domestic political dynamics pose a challenge, as efforts to combat foreign influence campaigns can be misconstrued as partisan politics.”
Yeah, misconstrued. Right.
“… the restoration of narrative control through techno-psychological warfare against the country’s own citizens.”
Maybe they can make a virtual Walter Cronkite and compel us all to watch, listen and believe. Everything else will be deemed to be Russian dezinformatsiya and reading it will be a crime.
Elsewhere, I get an email newsletter from an investment guy named John Mauldin. He mentioned that he was in South Africa. He was at a conference where the keynote speaker was former general David Petraeus. Petraeus is now a partner at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which is pretty nice work if you can get it. Petraeus required everyone attending to agree not to discuss what he talked about in his Keynote. However, he apparently did a public interview in which he mentioned that the four challenges facing the international system today are China, Russia, Iran, and domestic right wing populism. I must say it gives me no warm, feeling to know that a regime insider and former general puts me and people who share my political views in the same category as foreign military enemies. I wonder if Petraeus and Sydney Blumenthal have lunch together?
Petraeus is a fool if he actually believes that the US Right has capacity of that type or scale to be a threat at all. Worse than that, he is a traitor if he says such things without conviction.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
I wonder if secession is going to become a thing in South Africa. Western Cape independence has been a talking point for a few years now, based on how horribly governed the rest of the country is. And I don't really buy that Zuma's revolt has much of an ideological base - he's the historic ANC leader most able to viscerally connect with the poor, unlike the party's intellectuals, but this is mostly about two things: his own personal beef with Ramaphosa, and an ethnic split in the ANC. The MKP cleaned up in strongly Zulu areas and attracted very little support anywhere else. Since KZN has been in a state of low-level insurrection since Zuma was ousted from the presidency, that could be two of the nine provinces with only a wobbly commitment to staying in South Africa.
Perhaps some slim thread of hope Afrikaners might survive and someday secure a homeland of their own within the wreckage of South Africa.
Funny that the cyber warfare people are afraid of the Internet.
They had total control of TV, radio, and newspapers in an Orwellian fashion for decades. They thought they could control the Internet and we saw how much they tried the last few years!
Here's an interesting article that makes good points about the end of this authoritarian control because they had to be so extreme about covid, the mask of sanity slipped off and we saw how our politicians are just puppets to big interests.
https://realleft.substack.com/p/no-conspiracies-please-were-reality
"As traumatic transformations go, the covid operation is up there with industrialisation and de-industrialisation, and for time compression it is out on its own."
"And as for the rabbit hole trope – well, I don't think we’re going down the rabbit hole at all. We’re climbing out of it into the light."
Yes! I call this the sequel to 1984. The party lost the trust of the masses. Look how they're trying to make us scared of war with China and Russia.... Meanwhile the oil and money still flows.
What a joke.
To use the Alice in Wonderland analogy, we were hallucinating in wonderland and now waking to real land which is much less insane.
In the old days under apartheid, Washington and London feared that South Africa was developing an indigenous model of economic development that might offer an alternative for resource rich countries. The US and the UK preferred to leave it chronically under-developed, reliant on mineral and energy exports.
Since gaining control the ANC have wrecked things. They have pioneered race-based capitalism while deindustrializing, with vigorous encouragement from the US and UK. The great irony is that in the decades after apartheid both the US and UK have imposed a degree of deindustrialization upon their own people while simultaneously developing their own preferred form of race-based capitalism.
Former Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s 2023 book goes in the same vein about SA. The country’s energy utilities are grossly misnmanaged : jobs for regime flunkies, rock-like coal sourced at a ridiculous price, spare parts sold on the black market… it was amazing it produced the amount of electricity it did, and only shedded load a few hours a day. After almost 3 years of hard work, things were starting to improve, and he was poisoned and resigned. Dealing with the ANC seems like it was the worst part of the job.
Nationalism is frowned on by modern liberals. Yet they need things like US cyber command to maintain a nationally coherent narrative. I wonder if that contradiction will have consequences?
On cyber operations now being pivotal in both military and civilian spheres, Patrick Tucker says adversaries can "exploit social media to reach potentially billions with tailored messages and undermine trust in Western institutions, including the US military."
Jason Schenker says "the subjective nature of reality on social media platforms further complicates the US’s ability to maintain a coherent national identity and counter disinformation."
Or the people in charge of the US could counter disinformation by shutting down Kendi's operation.
And stop telling me George Floyd was murdered on the pavement in Minneapolis outside of Cup Foods. That would maintain a coherent national identity and build trust in Western institutions including the US military. Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to tell the truth once, than to tell a lie and then have to tell more lies to sustain it?
"Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to tell the truth once than tell a lie and then have to tell more lies to sustain it?"
Our DEI regime is based on lies. The cost and difficulty of maintaining them is its raison d'etre, its political formula. So no, telling the truth would disavow its legitimacy. The emperor is fully clothed, that deer is a horse, etc.
Putting all their eggs in the Tatmadaw basket would be foolish. Foreign meddling is like a financial portfolio - diversify in case the side you're backing gets wrecked.
"In short, it’s about the restoration of narrative control through techno-psychological warfare against the country’s own citizens." All policies seemed geared toward the degradation and control of Western middle classes - primary significance of Biden second term may be the planned environmental policies which will really put the squeeze on
Start here:
Dear Mr. / Madam School Board Trustee
I write to you today in a sincere effort to help you accomplish your noble goals for seeking this office.
That is to help you facilitate the betterment of our schools for our children and young people.
To do this, I ask you to make the Board meeting agenda and the data points behind them available to me as well as all of the other taxpayers.
Upload the stack to a server where we can read, ratify and or annul the elements after log on.
In a perfect world each paragraph must have at least three possible answers: agree, disagree, no opinion at this time.
Direct democracy is a growing trend, and many companies offer these services:
hosting, voter receipts, and a running tally of totals for everyone to see.
In this way Madam Trustee you are assured that you will always have the strength of the community with you when making the decisions that really do effect the lives of our people.
Vty,
Helpful Taxpayer Citizen
Hosting Companies:
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https://www.govtech.com/archive/introducing-the-21st-century-city-hall.html
I'm guessing Kendi's demise will only open up a spot for someone who is even more "anti-racist".
Excellent as always, thank you.
“[T]he digital media landscape has evolved, with individualized streams replacing credible national broadcasts….” Damnit, I’ve been subjected to dangerous malinformation that the perma-regime hates. Gee thanks, Niccolo!! 😅😅🤘🤘
"whites mostly voted for the DA and the Afrikaner dominated Freedom Front Plus (FF+); mixed-race people deserted the traditional parties to support “brown” and “first nation” parties"
The author seems to imply that the DA is mostly a whites' party. If anything, I understand the DA is a coloureds' and whites' party.
The U. S. and South Africa have something significant in common which is assisting the downfall of both. Both are countries that were systemically racist against Blacks that are now systemically racist against Whites.
It's ridiculously histrionic to claim the US is racist against white people.
"Will the viviparous ANC, still kingmaker after 30 years despite everything, cast towards its offshoots like the EFF or the MKP to keep power? Or towards the DA and its liberal-reformist Multi Party Charter? If the former, it brings either 51% or 55% of the electorate and what analyst Dr Frans Cronje calls the Chernobyl Option, keeping power in the short term but sowing the seeds of its own destruction. If the latter, it brings 76% of the electorate and possible economic redemption."
If a coalition with the DA is formed, how likely is it for ANC MPs to rebel against whatever economic reforms Ramaphosa has to concede to the DA, and simply switch parties?
If that's a likely scenario, then Ramaphosa may feel he has no choice but to negotiate a deal with the EFF or MKP.
They have a law against MPs defecting. This is very handy for Ramaphosa. But it doesn't apply to party activists further down the food chain.
I think the MKP and EFF have the advantage and also the disadvantage of polarising leaders. If either of them figures out a way to broaden their base, the ANC could be in even bigger trouble.
“The Rainbow Nation is actually a collection of fiercely tribal groupings that do not look beyond their own in-group.”
The kind of Rainbow America that Mr. Kendi is trying to create, and that his enablers also seem to want.
“… domestic political dynamics pose a challenge, as efforts to combat foreign influence campaigns can be misconstrued as partisan politics.”
Yeah, misconstrued. Right.
“… the restoration of narrative control through techno-psychological warfare against the country’s own citizens.”
Maybe they can make a virtual Walter Cronkite and compel us all to watch, listen and believe. Everything else will be deemed to be Russian dezinformatsiya and reading it will be a crime.
Elsewhere, I get an email newsletter from an investment guy named John Mauldin. He mentioned that he was in South Africa. He was at a conference where the keynote speaker was former general David Petraeus. Petraeus is now a partner at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which is pretty nice work if you can get it. Petraeus required everyone attending to agree not to discuss what he talked about in his Keynote. However, he apparently did a public interview in which he mentioned that the four challenges facing the international system today are China, Russia, Iran, and domestic right wing populism. I must say it gives me no warm, feeling to know that a regime insider and former general puts me and people who share my political views in the same category as foreign military enemies. I wonder if Petraeus and Sydney Blumenthal have lunch together?
Petraeus is a fool if he actually believes that the US Right has capacity of that type or scale to be a threat at all. Worse than that, he is a traitor if he says such things without conviction.
My guess is he is saying what the people he wants to impress want to hear. What future role he anticipates for himself as an open question.