Pressing Words
I have a few things to mention which should interest subscribers and regular readers to my blogs. I am still only getting a few dozen reads for most of my stuff. I have developed a few subscribers on both platforms, Substack and Wordpress, which is encouraging.
I so far have one paid subscriber. As I repeat often, my motive is not to make money doing this. However, a little cash flow might be okay, to cover some expenses of running this.
Substack keeps putting these “switch to paid” buttons on my stuff. Lately it seems to be trying to put invites to be a paid subscriber on the twitter posts, instead of the featured image I set. Everyone is getting more desperate for more revenue, except me.
This is the number one thing wrong with social media now, especially the blogosphere. Everybody is competing for a very limited number of eyeballs and money. It strongly influences what people write and how they write.
The focus is on trying to attract attention, telling people what they want to read, not on what really needs to be said. It has become clear to me that my focus on the latter means I am not going to get much of a readership until there is some change in the structure of the net. But if I can keep getting a few dozen readers, and slowly growing subscriptions, it is worth doing.
My focus going forward will be on building an archive of really good material on several critical topics. I want them to stay relevant for a long time. I will be able to keep referring people back to them.
Despite the fact that I am ranked lower than a mushroom on search engines, and no double being throttled by the forces of evil, a few people still find my work. This is the big reason I keep a Wordpress up, despite getting less traffic overall to it. It allows me organize my best stuff into a searchable archive.
Substack is great in many ways, but it has this ‘yesterday’s news’ mentality. It seems to expect that everything will get read once, maybe if it catches on discussed back and forth for a few days, then it is down the memory hole. It is hard to find it again.
I do not think I am being throttled on Substack; just up against intense competition. And again, I write what most people do not want to read. Occasionally I break through and get a lot more reads; mostly when it is about something not being adequately covered, and if I can get some referrals from other platforms.
Right now I am still trying to merely get my newer Wordpress platform going exactly right. It seems the trouble I am having setting up the archive as I want it has much to do with bugs in Wordpress’s reorganization of its back end.
I would appreciate it if stuff I am paying money for would just work as it is supposed to. However, the Wordpress tech people are usually as helpful as they are able, and sympathetic. They acknowledge that there is a huge problem with shadowing and throttling now, such that it severely effects their ability to “search engine optimize” their client’s sites.
Optimism
On my older Wordpress, really just a mockup of a site, some of my stuff got over 1000 reads. Mostly, it was about the Ukraine war. However, I do not want to write just about that.
I might seem to be all over the place, but most of my stuff has one underlying theme. The way things are has reached its end. We are going into a period of turmoil and transformation not seen in eighty years.
What I am going to get into, increasingly, is what kind of order must come after this. Also, how to get there. The forces of order will not like what I have said about this so far; another reason why I just might be getting throttled slightly.
Many personal acquaintances criticize me for being too pessimistic. In reply I point to an old aphorism; one person says things could not get worse, the second says things can get a lot worse. The first is a pessimist, the second is an optimist.
I am an optimist. Think about it a bit.
We are in for another decade or so of “interesting times”. I believe that if we get through this, if we do not get wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, conditions will emerge for a few golden age, like the period 1945 to 1975 in the west. It is a matter of finally getting the right people in control of things.
All this is worth about 1000 blog posts. I have the time to do them, the brains to do them, and a few dollars for basics like an internet connection and a blog platform. So hang around, folks.
I also like doing some other things sometimes, than just read stuff off the net and write blog posts and comments. But reading, thinking, and writing are the only things I am any damn good at.
Finding Good Stuff to Read
I used to say that Twitter was the best news feed in the world. It was the best way to find links to good, concise material about the important issues. It had plenty of lighter reading on it, too.
Most people know that the quality of Twitter has been declining due to increasing ’content management’. The value of Twitter was that anyone could announce things and get it circulated widely. People could find what was of interest to them, even when they had not been aware of it.
To fill that role, there can really be only one Twitter. Other platforms that people thought might be a replacement for Twitter fail for this reason. They are too compartmentalized; you cannot search for what you want and people cannot find you.
I find myself spending much less time on Twitter and much more on good old fashioned e-mail. Before Twitter that was what I used, and now it is having a second coming. Many of the technical problems with distribution lists have been solved.
Twitter is still useful for finding good new websites and e-mail lists, much more so than Google. Increasingly, though, I am finding good new sources being referred by other bloggers and web sites.
It goes without saying, avoid all corporate media like you would zombies. They want to eat your brain.
Review of “Dark Winter”
I still often read stuff the old fashioned way; off dead trees dropped at my door by Amazon and competitors. Two weeks ago I finally got a copy of Raina MacIntyre’s book, “Dark Winter” about the hazards of uncontrolled biological research. I have been gradually reading through it.
I recommend it to anyone interested in the origins of covid and in securing against any further non natural biological outbreaks. She coined the phrase “biological winter” to describe the phase the world may now be entering. That is, a public health crisis, leading to an economic and social crisis, from a proliferation of unnatural infectious agents allowed to get into circulation.
These things will not just harm people directly through disease, but ruin the crops and herds which supply our food. The analogy, of course, is to the “nuclear winter” after a nuclear war. However, it does not need an outright biowar between states.
The severity and number of instances Raina related, of people doing ridiculous and irresponsible things which killed, or could have killed, huge numbers of people, is disturbing. Even more is the propensity of authority to learn nothing from them and try to cover them up.
Technology this dangerous must be under tight control. Right now it would not be hard for some terrorist group to get hold of the equipment and know-how to unleash on the planet something far worse than covid.
Scientists tend to have a cliqueish relationship with each other. They are often more interested in protecting each other and their funding sources, than in keeping the public safe. Some very strange people have worked in virology labs and gotten away with disturbing things.
Thus Raina says that scientists are not the people to investigate new virus outbreaks. This should be done by police and intelligence people. However, they need to have the systems in place to trace origins.
New diseases must be studied to determine if they are a natural or unnatural development. The source of unnatural infections must be quickly shut down. Raina is cagey about whether covid is unnatural, but seems to think so.
Aw, hell, read the book! Go to her Twitter feed.
When is a Nazi a Nazi?
I still blog frequently about the Ukraine conflict. Lately I had a puzzling comment on one of my posts. Someone is frustrated about the statement that Ukraine is run by Nazis and does not see the evidence for that.
The thing is, I am not doing academic or technocratic writing here. I am not even doing journalism. I am engaged in public discussion; trying to present a better way of thinking about present day reality.
For that, I employ abductive reasoning. I have done some recent blogging about what that is. It did not get so many reads, for some reason.
I often have problems with people who insist I must “prove” things inductively. Inductive reasoning only works where there is a limited number of variables. It can be useful in court cases or in scientific research.
For purposes of public discussion, induction is useless, except as a way of harassing someone saying something you do not like. Truth is obtained by swimming in the sea of information and using your brain in the way it was evolved to work, by developing abstractions. The three orders of abstraction; facts, relations between facts, and principles governing relations between facts.
To assist in this task, people learn various heurisitics. One of my favourites is; “If it looks like a duck, …” So, if it looks like a Nazi, quacks like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi, it is a Nazi.
There are plenty of picture galleries and videos available, showing the similarities between the Hitlerite Nazis and their Ukrainian followers, and the present day Banderites of Ukraine. A picture is worth a thousand words. The same symbols; Swastika, Wolfangel, Iron Sun, Totenkopf. The same rituals, like torch light processions, even the same songs.
The rhetoric of the present “Azovs” is very close to that of the Banderites of the 1940s; a blend of Hitlerian rhetoric and Ukrainian nationalist hate speech dating back to Austrian rule. Russian people are “Judeo-Mongoloids”. The only things missing, so far, is the hate against Poles and Jews; they depend on them too much.
A signature Nazi behaviour is the seizure of government in violent coups. This is followed by intimidation of opposition by acts of extreme cruelty, then the indoctrination of the population through media and the education system. Attacks on religious institutions which do not further their indoctrination are also typical Nazi behaviour.
All these “Banderist” organizations openly identify with Nazism. When their western backers ask them to tone down the Nazi ritual and rhetoric, to make them more saleable, they are told to fuck off. It is well known that the reason there will be no peace in Ukraine is that the “Azovs” will immediately kill any government official who even suggests it.
The Ukraine Nazis are clearly in control of Ukraine. As with the old Nazis, they were put in power by oligarchic interests. As with most Nazi groups, they are starting to go “Frankenstein” on their creators. This is why even most western media is starting to cautiously suggest that there are Nazis in Ukraine and they just might have influence on government.
There are two tendencies which still deny that “Ukrainian Government=Nazis”. One are the disinformation operatives for western imperialism. The other seems to be people who have been abused by a miseducation in a type of thinking which belongs back in the middle ages.