The Bread And Circuses Are Winding Up

Panem et circenses is an ancient Roman phrase, attributed to the poet Juvenal, that means “bread and circuses.” The idea is that a degenerate society, once it has abandoned all higher values, has nothing left but bread and circuses. Take that away, and the society will fall apart. Our bread and circuses are in the process of being taken away.

The Roman Empire discovered that paying for public circuses was a great way of preventing civil unrest. If the people had an upcoming gladiatorial games to look forward to, they were much more likely to be content. When they didn’t have anything to look forward to, they tended to entertain thoughts of rebellion.

Eventually, the Romans found themselves unable to pay for more games, and that was the tipping point. The cessation of the circuses meant that the citizens got their entertainment from wrecking society instead, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

The Western World appears to be going through a similar process.

Professional sports have replaced the circuses in the West, and most professional sports leagues have been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The English Premier League season lost three months, the Major League Baseball season lost 100 games, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, predicted that running the NFL later this year would be impossible.

In New Zealand, there hasn’t been a single All Blacks match so far in 2020, and it looks like there won’t be. There hasn’t been a Black Caps match since March, and there is no news of upcoming fixtures (although a tour to Bangladesh has supposedly been planned).

Even worse, the increasing politicisation of professional sport has seen many turn their televisions off. NBA viewership is down some 20% compared to this time last year. Although the linked article suggests injuries to star players may be the cause of the decline, the truth is that many viewers are sick of having political issues shoved in their faces.

People watch sport to be entertained. They don’t care about the political opinions of professional sportsmen, any more than they care to watch Donald Trump play basketball. They know the sportsmen are not educated intellectuals who study history and human nature. As such, their political opinions don’t need to be taken seriously.

Compounding the problem are blatant double standards when it comes to the political issues being pushed.

In an NBA match earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers player Montrezl Harrell called Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy“. Although a white player calling a black player a “bitch ass black boy” would be a worldwide scandal, it appears that Harrell is going to avoid sanction entirely.

There might be an inherent demand for entertainment once a person’s basic survival needs are met, but it’s hard to be a white person and keep watching a sports league when you know that league explicitly endorses anti-white racial abuse. It’s a direct humiliation, and many sports fans have found themselves switching off instead.

As in ancient Rome, the lack of easily-available entertainment has led to people seeking it elsewhere, in more destructive ways. There is a direct link between the winding up of the American circuses and the widespread civil unrest there. Instead of finding entertainment in sport, people are finding it in other people getting shot and beaten to death.

More worryingly, the bread is also winding up.

When Juvenal spoke of “bread” he was referring to the grain dole, another Roman invention for defraying rebellious sentiments. Because of the psychological effect of starvation, hungry populations soon become violent. The Roman masses were pacified with free grain, then free bread, wine and pork.

When this food dole wound up, people started going hungry, and this led to even more trouble than the boredom. A bored person can get entertained quickly by setting something on fire; a hungry person won’t be satisfied until they kill someone. For the Roman ruling classes, to not dole out bread meant the collapse of their society.

The West doesn’t have a grain dole, but we do have a system of social welfare which has much the same effect. It’s also being scaled back.

In America, negotiations for a second stimulus check are in doubt, because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on terms. The first stimulus check was granted because the coronavirus pandemic had destroyed many American jobs, but those jobs are yet to return, and therefore the economic stress has not gone away.

In New Zealand, the COVID-19 Resurgence Wage Subsidy – designed to have a similar effect to the American stimulus checks – is expiring later this week. The likely outcome is a high volume of job losses. Already the New Zealand economy has been hit hard by the near-total annihilation of our international tourism sector; further major job losses would cause widespread despair.

It’s possible that Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern will extend welfare benefits, at least for now. But the largesse cannot be continued indefinitely. The New Zealand national debt was $US 59.6 billion in March this year, but has already blown out to $US 81.1 billion by September. They can’t keep borrowing money to keep the party going forever.

When these special coronavirus payments are stopped, the inevitable result will be an increase in the number of people taking to the streets in protest. Given how ugly sentiments already are, with multiple protesters having been shot dead in America over the past week, a wider collapse of order is a very realistic prospect.

In summary, society is held together by bread and circuses, and both of those are winding up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is occurring across the Western World, which suggests that we’re all in for some difficult times over the next 12 months or so.

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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The Four Ages Of The Internet

A previous essay on this page recounted the life cycle of Internet forums. The Second Hermetic Principle teaches us that as below, so above. As this essay will describe, the Internet itself is running on a life cycle – and we’re moving into the less enjoyable part of it.

The Golden Age of the Internet began in August 1995, with the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95. This operating system took the Internet out of the hands of the technological elite, and put it in the hands of the masses. This was the beginning of the personal computing revolution.

At first, the Internet appealed mostly to nerds, who had been starved of information thanks to the relative inefficiency of the book-and-library system. These nerds did what came naturally, which was to use the Internet to share information. They created all kinds of websites, most of them on subjects appealing to young men, like science, technology and engineering.

In the Golden Age of the Internet, websites consisted of little other than pure information and hyperlinks to more. Being restricted by bandwidth, websites focussed almost entirely on sharing the greatest quality of this info. Search engines such as Metacrawler indexed it all for ease of access. It was like having a library in every house.

The peak of the peak may have been around 2002, when an enormous number of small websites were available on GeoCities (later known as “GeoShitties”). This was also the peak of websites such as SlashDot, which appealed specifically to the programmers who were building the infrastructure of the Internet.

By 2003, the seeds of the decline had become apparent. Google AdSense was launched that year, which changed the web publishing game permanently. AdSense offered something truly revolutionary: cold, hard cash. But as is usually the case when cash is on the table, there were conditions.

The Google AdSense program was funded by advertisers, and those advertisers expected a certain degree of influence. In the same way that advertisers in newspapers 100 years ago exerted influence over what those newspapers published, AdSense advertisers pressured Google to not show ads on sites that carried certain content.

That meant content relating to illicit drugs, erotic literature, serial killers, violent anarchy and political extremism (i.e. all the interesting stuff) was produced less. This was the start of the great decline. Once Google AdSense money got involved, website owners started self-censoring to keep the shekels flowing in. The Golden Age of the Internet ended, and the Silver Age began.

The Silver Age of the Internet began on the 26th of September 2006, when FaceBook became open to everyone, and not just university students. This was the point at which social media really began to take off, a big deal because it meant that users could generate their own content. This steady stream of content could then be exploited by inserting advertising slots in it.

With the arrival of FaceBook, the Internet became a true commercial venture. Now there were billions of dollars involved. This was a Silver Age because of advertising, which corrupted the purity of the information. Although there was a greater quantity of information than ever, it had advertisements all through it.

The advertisers demanded more and more influence over the content. Eventually, FaceBook and YouTube became televisionised, with an extensive list of content restrictions. People started to get banned for calling each other ‘faggot’ or ‘nigger’. But still the Internet grew, to the point where the government decided that they had to get involved.

Once Big Government started to take an interest in what was being said on social media, and making up laws over who was allowed to say what, the Silver Age ended. The Bronze Age of the Internet began in April 2016, when Count Dankula was arrested for a YouTube video of a dog giving a Nazi salute. The freewheeling, freespeaking Internet of free expression was gone.

By the time of the Bronze Age of the Internet, there were so many retards online that much of cyberspace became detrimental to mental health. As the IQ of the average Internet user continued to decline, the quality of the average Internet experience became lower and lower. During the Golden Age of the Internet, the world’s retards bullied people for using computers – in the Bronze Age, they bully people by using computers.

If the Golden Age of the Internet saw its realisation, and the Silver Age saw its commercialisation, the Bronze Age saw its weaponisation. It was realised that, in the 21st Century, wars would be fought with information rather than bullets. The politicisation of the Internet saw people act to restrict the platform access of their ideological enemies.

By the time of writing this article, wrongthinkers are getting purged left, right and centre. Even websites like Reddit, founded in the twilight of the Golden Age specifically as a free-speech platform, are banning entire subforums on a weekly basis. It’s forbidden to discuss any subject that displeases the advertisers.

This has seen the rise and rise of imageboard culture, especially the chans such as 4chan. The ‘anything goes’ nature of these sites appeals to those who appreciated the Golden Age. In the Bronze Age of the Internet, those parts of cyberspace that still uphold the values of the Golden Age are dismissed as “cesspits”. This merely causes the appeal of the chans to grow further.

The Iron Age of the Internet is yet to begin. We can predict what it will look like: a totalitarian surveillance network in which the activities and social interactions of every citizen are tracked to the finest detail. 5G networks offer the bandwidth to transmit high-definition video footage faster than it can be viewed, and the advent of facial recognition technology means that they will know exactly where you are in real time.

Free speech restrictions might be bad now, but they can get worse. Improving AI tech will make it possible for any social media comment to be analysed and, if necessary, shadowbanned before anyone can see it. Even more ominously, the governments of all Western nations appear willing to increase Police harassment of online wrongthinkers.

When the Iron Age of the Internet is fully upon us, the Internet will be unrecognisably different from its Golden Age, much like today’s religions are radically different to those practiced during the Western spiritual tradition’s Golden Age in ancient Greece. We will then, as per Plato’s Republic, have to wait for a movement of philosopher-kings to overthrow the old Internet and institute a new one.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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The Ultimate Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory

2020 so far has been the year of the Coronavirus, probably the biggest thing to happen to the world since World War II. As with every major event, plenty of bullshit has been spoken about it. This has led to an inevitable spate of conspiracy theories. This article describes the ultimate COVID-19 conspiracy.

Most conspiracy theories arise to explain otherwise inexplicable behaviour on the part of the ruling class. The great replacement theory arose to explain why Western elites allow so much mass immigration. Another theory suggests that cannabis prohibition was instituted to repress freethinking, not to protect mental health.

The ultimate coronavirus conspiracy theory arose in the aftermath of the economic damage done to Western societies by lockdowns. It isn’t easy to explain why Western rulers are willing to do so much damage to their economies for the sake of a virus that has a 99.7%+ survival rate. Some calculations suggest that the economic damage done by the lockdowns will kill more people than the virus.

One conspiracy theory has it that these lockdowns are part of a Communist revolution, in which the followers of Marx seek to deal a fatal blow to capitalism by destroying as many businesses as they can. The uncertainty created by the threat of further lockdowns has made many businesses go bankrupt, and some think this economic disruption may have been the goal all along.

This theory shares some features with the ultimate coronavirus conspiracy, but the ultimate one is more scientific.

Many climatologists contend that the Earth’s climate is being placed under intolerable stress right now. According to the theories put forward, the volume of industrial emissions getting pumped into the Earth’s atmosphere is so vast that it has started to heat up the planet. Earth’s temperature has spiked in recent years, and if we keep producing emissions at this rate it will continue to climb.

The problem: if the temperature of the planet would heat up by more than a few degrees, human life would no longer be possible. The ecosystems of the Earth are so finely balanced that any change in temperature will cause disruption and death. A two degree temperature rise would have catastrophic effects on food yields, and thus on the viability of human civilisation.

It follows from this line of reasoning that our current course of action is like being in a car that’s accelerating into a brick wall. The emissions we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere have raised the Earth’s temperature by 0.6 degrees, and half of those have been in the last 30 years. Another few decades of emissions will raise it by two degrees or more. If we don’t change course – and drastically – we’re all going to die.

It follows from that line of reasoning that any measure, no matter how extreme, is permissible if it achieved the goal of preventing ecological collapse. Reducing our industrial emissions is an imperative – if we don’t, we’re dead. It simply doesn’t matter how we do this. No price is too high to avoid ecological collapse.

The world’s industries produce their emissions as an inescapable byproduct of meeting the world’s demand for goods and services. The only way to reduce emissions to a level where the planet can survive is to reduce economic activity, perhaps by shutting down all of the advanced economies of the world.

Any idiot can anticipate that people would resist such a proposal. After all, we all know that when the elite ask us to make sacrifices, they don’t intend to make any themselves. An economic shutdown would primarily affect the already poor.

How, then, to get the world to accept a drastic reduction to their standard of living? As rulers have always known, put enough fear through a population and they’ll do whatever you tell them to. Author Michael Crichton described it simply: “Social control is best managed by fear.”

The usual sources of fear are absent this year. There is no sign of a war on the horizon, and the Muslims have been quiet since the Christchurch mosque shooting. So the ruling class had to go back to the tried and true: a pandemic.

The ultimate coronavirus conspiracy theory has it that the world’s ruling classes took the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 outbreak to dismantle the world’s economy under the guise of fighting the virus. The real motive behind the lockdowns is to reduce fossil fuel emissions. The coronavirus pandemic might have happened naturally, and might be a real thing with real victims, but the lockdown measures are only superficially related to the pandemic itself.

The true purpose of these intensely intrusive rolling lockdowns is to suffocate the world’s economic’s activity. This is why no-one cares about the severe GDP contractions: those are not drawbacks but objectives.

Even though socialist rulers like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand or Dan Andrews in Victoria are successfully destroying capitalism in the areas under their control, the lockdowns aren’t a Communist conspiracy to destroy the West. Capitalism, and the economies of the world, are being destroyed to save the environment.

We can predict from this that the lockdowns will continue until living standards in the West are reduced to around the level experienced by Brazil today, or less. This might take five or ten years to achieve.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Glowie’?

Alternative movements have always been concerned about spies within their ranks. It’s a fact of life that if you get any kind of interesting movement happening, the Establishment will try to fuck it up before it becomes a threat to them. Their agents who they task to do so are often referred to as ‘glowies’.

The term comes from the belief that infiltrators into certain groups stand out so much that it is as if they glow in the dark. Agents provocateur can enter Internet spaces and start agitating for violence as a way of poisoning the well. Sometimes these individuals stand out like a television screen stands out in a dark room.

A ‘glowie’ (or ‘glownigger’) is an infiltrator, usually a government-controlled one, who is advocating for some action that brings the group into disrepute. Their purpose is to sow discord and division within alternative movements, with the intent that those movements either collapse from infighting or are banned.

Some believe that federal intelligence agents are regular visitors to certain Internet locations. According to this belief, the security services are concerned that these Internet forums are radicalising young men into taking violent actions that threaten the Establishment. Both Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant were known to spend a lot of time online, and the security services want to preempt the next one like them.

Support for beliefs like this come from known facts about psychological operations such as Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA made an effort to use the power of mass media to manipulate public opinion, molding it to be more conducive to achieving America’s security objectives.

Operation Mockingbird saw the CIA plant or recruit individuals within the mainstream media, who then used their position in the apparatus of propaganda to regiment the public’s opinions on certain matters. With control of enough media sources, the CIA was able to manufacture consent for evils like the Vietnam War.

The CIA claims to no longer do this, but evidence suggests they do. The mainstream media happily did the cheerleading for the Iraq War, just as willingly as if they had taken direction from the CIA itself. It wasn’t until after then that social media had become popular enough to threaten the television’s stranglehold on popular perception.

The rise of the Internet, the story has it, provided a new challenge to the CIA’s ability to control the narrative. Once people were able to discuss things in online groups of likeminded people, away from those trying to manipulate them, they started arriving at conclusions that the ruling class didn’t want them to.

Thanks to the Internet, people were able to get together and realise that the government was lying about cannabis, was lying about psychedelics, was lying about wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam (and everywhere else), was lying about acting in the people’s interest, was lying about their rights to enforce laws on an unconsenting populace etc.

Thanks to the Internet, many slaves came to leave the thought plantation.

The ultimate threat to the CIA’s narrative control comes from imageboards. On these boards, people from all around the world get together to discuss politics without interference from mainstream media brands and personalities. This leads them to draw conclusions that are unpalatable to their rulers.

To destroy imageboard culture, or so those afraid of glowies say, federal agents have descended on them with the specific intent of encouraging acts of violence. This violence achieves two major goals: associating violence with a particular imageboard can help to get it banned, and successful terrorist attacks cause the security services to get more government funding.

All this explains why, if someone suggests that the way forward is to start shooting people, that person will be called a “glowie” and told to piss off.

In reality, secret security officers don’t agitate to have politicians killed. That would be like a pub bouncer specifically inviting patched gang members into the bar to fight the bartenders, with the intent that the pub owner will then expand their security apparatus by hiring more bouncers. Secret security officers, like any other professional, are judged on how well their achieve their core responsibilities. Theirs are to keep politicians safe.

However, it’s true that the security services keep close tabs on alternative thinkers and places where alternative thinkers gather. They would be remiss not to, on account of that, historically speaking, challenges to the system are often violent. Ever since the assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, those tasked with protecting the Establishment have believed that threats can arise from anywhere that freethinking is allowed to fester.

The author of this book has been visited by police officers who wanted to interrogate him about his political beliefs. This is becoming more and more common throughout Clown World. Glowies don’t encourage people to kill politicians online, but they’re sure not above letting freethinkers know they’re being watched.

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