Why Stuff Is Worth Less Than VJM Publishing

Many New Zealanders were surprised last week by reports that the Stuff news portal at www.stuff.co.nz was worth less than one dollar. How could it be possible that our foremost media portal, which employs hundreds of people, has a lower net value than a ramshackle outfit like VJM Publishing? This essay explains.

Stuff has a world Alexa rank in the top 4,000, and was ranked 7th in New Zealand at time of writing. They get hundreds of times more traffic than VJM Publishing does. They have been legitimised in most people’s minds as the “mainstream media” and, despite being shit, are considered to be “proper” journalism.

So how can they make less money? The simple answer comes down to who owns Stuff and what they have bought ownership for.

The VJM Publishing strategy is not to churn out vast numbers of shitty articles, with clickbait headlines, about vapid celebrities, in the hope of tricking some pleb into clicking on some more clickbait in the form of an advertisement.

No wonder advertising revenue is plummeting, if that is the business model.

VJM Publishing doesn’t make money from spamming Google ads through every page or by having banks of them at the bottom of every article like Stuff does. In fact, we don’t make any money from advertising revenue – we make it from selling books. Every page on this website has a set of links to our book sale pages on Amazon and TradeMe.

Making a living selling books is tough, but it’s possible. The trick is to produce material of a high enough quality that it promotes and advertises itself. This is the secret to ranking well in the Google algorithm, because that algorithm can estimate a page’s quality by measuring the responses of its readers. If the readers tend to click away quickly, it’s probably a low-quality page, and vice-versa.

This is a different business plan to that of Stuff, but we are in fact a publishing company, not an advertising seller (or reseller). As such, we compete on quality and not on volume.

This company operates under the logic that if we can provide quality articles about esoteric subjects and alternative psychology, as well as intelligent political commentary from an alt-centrist perspective, that this will give us an edge. As long as this edge leads people to become aware of our books, some people will buy them, and we make profits.

All of this sounds so obvious, that the question has to be asked: why doesn’t Stuff do similar?

The first thing is to look at who owns the New Zealand media: essentially it’s owned by international banking and finance interests. This was demonstrated by us here at VJM Publishing, in an example of the kind of journalism that the mainstream media will never give you.

These international banking and finance interests don’t care if they lose money from Stuff. They gain something of far, far greater value: control of the narrative. Thanks to having control of the narrative, they can normalise all kinds of things that are in their benefit. In principle, every article on Stuff has been calculated to suit the agenda of its owners.

By directing Stuff to constantly cry and scream about racism, those owners achieve several objectives.

The international banking and finance interests make enormous profits from mass immigration. Not only does every new immigrant push the price of housing up and generate one new mortgage account, but their cheaper labour also pushes the cost of running a business down. On top of all that, their presence destroys the solidarity of the host nation, making it easier to rule over. Win-win-win.

The major opponents to the mass importation of cheap labour are the native working class. They lose the most heavily as they don’t tend to own houses, and they tend to sell rather than hire labour. As such, the mainstream media makes a great effort to paint these people as ignorant bigots who oppose mass immigration out of nothing but pure hatred.

It has to be understood that the mainstream media stokes up hysteria about racism for money. Not only does it generate clicks and traffic, but it also normalises the idea that mass immigration is normal and that anyone objecting to it is evil. Multiculturalism destroys the ability of the host nation to resist the predations of the international banking and finance classes – and the latter know this intuitively.

By directing Stuff to fill space with crap about Meghan Markle, they also achieve several objectives.

Foremost of these are wasting people’s time and conscious awareness on shit. If the mainstream media informed people about issues that directly impacted their well-being, it would agitate them. This might lead to chaos, which is bad for business. Much better to have a passive population who can be milked for profits without protest.

The best thing for business is for the populace to be induced into maximum docility. Perfection would be a herd of consumers that only get excited when the next product is released. So the mainstream media is directed to fill their pages with fluff pieces about irrelevant people. Meghan Markle, who has no connection to New Zealand at all, is the ideal subject.

All of these objectives serve one greater meta-objective: to gain control over our minds. Whoever controls the mainstream media – otherwise known as the apparatus of propaganda – controls the minds of the people. They control what the people hear, what the people think, what the people consider normal. Effectively they control how the people react to every stimulus that is put before them.

It’s an enormous power, perhaps the archetypal modern expression of what Elementalists call silver magic.

In summary: the international banking and finance interests who own the mainstream media are happy to lose money from it as long as they gain control of the narrative, because this confers a great deal of power. The elites run Stuff as a loss-leader to capture the attention of the masses in the same way that supermarkets run chocolate specials as loss-leaders. The losses from it are written off against greater profits elsewhere.

VJM Publishing, by contrast, is run as an actual business, whose mission is to provide quality information, forecasting and analysis in exchange for money. As such, we have to maintain a net worth above zero.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Slavedrivers Of The Realm Of Silver

Slavedrivers have always been naturally of the realm of iron – or so it seems. The whips and chains and other sadomasochistic accoutrements of the slavedriver all appear induced to cause physical suffering. As this essay will explain, however, there is an entire niche of people adapted to do the same thing, only they use psychological suffering. They are the slavedrivers of the realm of silver.

The slavedrivers of ancient Egypt, of the medieval Arabs and of the American South were all of the realm of iron. They had learned that the slaves would become compliant after enough beatings, and so their niche was to use violence and the threat of pain to induce compliance. The main purpose of this was to get them to work.

Another main purpose of the slavedrivers of the realm of iron is to make sure that the slaves don’t leave the plantation. The slavedrivers made sure that the slaves are restricted to clearly defined physical boundaries. Straying outside of these, whether by refusing to do something or by doing the wrong thing, resulted in punishment, or was simply made impossible from the beginning by use of chains.

The purpose of the slavedrivers of the realm of silver is to make sure that the slaves don’t leave the thought plantation.

Joseph Stalin once said “Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don’t let our enemies have guns, so why would we let them have ideas?” This summarises the ethos of the slavedrivers of the realm of silver. Their objective is to make sure that the slaves do not have ideas that threaten the objectives of the slave owners, by keeping them within the clearly defined boundaries of the thought plantation.

The first of these slavedrivers that people encounter are teachers. The education system works on the “give with one hand, take with the other principle.” They give people useful knowledge about mathematics, science, grammar and logic, and in exchange they take away the intellectual independence of those people by enforcing conformity of thought.

A person’s teachers will tell them where the boundaries of the thought plantation are. They will cause psychological suffering to any student who strays outside those boundaries, primarily through belittling them. It will be implied that any unapproved thought is stupid, and that any student entertaining an unapproved thought is stupid.

When a person becomes an adult, their teachers are replaced by “experts” on television. These talking heads are the ones tasked with keeping adults on the thought plantations. Because less than 10% of the population is educated enough to understand a scientific paper, and therefore to determine truth from falsehood, television experts are the final authority on whether certain claims are true or not.

The television experts tell people what’s real and what isn’t. The people then parrot the statements of the television experts to each other, and after they’ve heard them parroted often enough they come to be accepted as the truth. The slavedrivers of the realm of silver are the ones who cause people to believe what they do. In the 21st century, they are in charge of the apparatus of propaganda.

The main objective of the slavedrivers of the realm of silver is to induce people to submit to the way that they’re being ruled. They don’t use whips, as do the slavedrivers of the realm of iron, so they have to cause suffering in more subtle ways. They manipulate the way that humans have evolved to cause them pain in social, intellectual and spiritual domains.

One major tactic is to play on a person’s fear of feeling stupid. Because the slavedrivers of silver are always in a position of social authority, their words carry weight. Therefore, teachers and television figures can make people feel stupid for holding any unapproved ideas.

The other major tactic is to play on a person’s fear of ostracisation. No-one wants to get kicked out of their peer group, and if the peer group comes to believe something you better come to believe it as well or risk your position. The slavedrivers of the realm of silver will tell people that “everyone thinks X” or “the group thinks X”, and so anyone thinking differently is guilty of violating social norms, meaning that some aggression against them may be justified.

Both teachers and media pundits encourage people to bully freethinkers as “the idiot who thinks Y”, where Y is a thought proscribed by the plantation owners. In practice, Y could be almost literally anything. American students are bullied today for not having been subjected to male infant genital mutilation, so in theory any perversity can be normalised.

The slavedrivers of the realm of silver condition people into obedience with the same cruelty and aggression as the plantation overseers of the antebellum American South. They do this for the same reasons – to earn the favour of the plantation owners who pay their wages. It’s a whores and gangsters world, and the slavedriver plays both roles.

The fact that people are getting Police harassment visits for social media posts (as is becoming more common all over the West) portends disaster. If the plantation owners are getting slavedrivers of the realm of iron (such as the Police) to do jobs that had previously been delegated to the slavedrivers of the realm of silver, it could mean that the plantation owners are losing control.

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VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda XI

This reading continues from here.

Chapter Eleven in Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘The Mechanics of Propaganda.’ Here Bernays talks about how propaganda gets transmitted to the public.

Bernays defined propaganda here as “the establishing of reciprocal understanding between a person and a group.” Therefore, there is no practical limit to the number and type of media that may be employed to transmit propaganda (one wonders what Bernays would have made of the Internet).

He writes about how the public meeting was the best means of propaganda 50 years ago (i.e. in the 1870s), but people have become “sick of the ballyhoo of the rally,” and prefer to get information from the radio and newspapers. The propagandist must keep up with the shifting patterns of the popularity of various media, as well as anticipate future changes.

Bernays notes here that there is almost no item of news that, if published, would not benefit the interests of some people and harm the interests of others. He notes also that the newspaper does not care about the propaganda value of a piece of information, but only about its news value. Thus, propaganda that is also news is more likely to get propagated.

It’s important to tailor the message to the audience. The propagandist must create propaganda items with specific audiences in mind. To this end, magazines are different to newspapers because they’re not obliged to print news. This also means that magazines are kind of naturally like propaganda organs.

The propagandist might like to consider supplying a propaganda organ with a series of articles that puts the case to a particular audience. This is especially likely to succeed if that organ feels like they can derive prestige from the association with the company the propagandist works for.

Hilariously (with hindsight), Bernays is able to speak about the radio when it was a new invention and its development uncertain. He notes that many newspaper enterprises have moved into radio, correctly in his estimation. Anticipating the Internet, he predicts that various groups will have an ev ever-increasing interest in buying media space for the sake of propagandising.

Incredibly, Bernays was able to write 90 years ago that Hollywood films were major propaganda devices. He also predicts the rise of the cult of personality by noting that “the public instinctively demands a personality to typify a conspicuous corporation or enterprise.” This is acutely true in New Zealand, where our Prime Ministers have little to go on apart from the personality cults.

Bernays notes that the public has already become cynical to attempts at manipulating them through the media, but some interests are universal. People will always have a need for food, for amusement, for beauty and for leadership. For this reason, they will always seek out sources of propaganda.

He leaves us with the statement: “Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.” This statement must be read in the light of World War I, which was itself the result of the old methods of fighting. In this sense, Bernays and this book herald a shift from an Age of Iron to an Age of Silver.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

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VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda X

This reading carries on from here.

The tenth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Art And Science.’ Here Bernays discusses how one can use propaganda in the service of culture.

As in other chapters, Bernays emphasises that the success of almost any enterprise today depends on public acceptance. Therefore, if a gallery is to successfully run an exhibition featuring a particular artist, they will need to first ensure that their works have public acceptance.

Bernays gives us the maxim “In art as in politics the minority rules,” by which he means that those who understand “the anatomy of public opinion” can shape it. He claims that propaganda gives the artist the opportunity to collaborate with industry to improve society.

As in previous chapters, Bernays mentions that the interest of the public can be captured by associations and by dramatic incidents. He gives the example of an American silk manufacturer who forms industry links with Parisian fashion houses for the sake of forming an association.

The effect of aesthetics is laboured in this chapter. Bernays writes that, because mass production has driven the costs of producing propaganda to the floor, propagandists must look for other ways to stand out. One way is by applying aesthetics to their product. There is an economic incentive to meet the public demand for more beauty.

Part of propaganda is to give people something to talk about when they meet up at tea parties. To that end, it’s important to bring people the best of art and aesthetics as they relate to one’s industry. Museums have an interest in making their message intelligible to the public, and to that end they must employ propaganda.

Even in the late 1920s, Bernays was able to write about the phenomenon where scientific research is sponsored by large corporations. This phenomenon was already powerful enough that Bernays could write about it changing the whole world over decade previous to Propaganda being written. Science needs propaganda in order to condition the public to accept the advances it makes.

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