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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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Clown World Chronicles: Who Is Virgin?

Most of the luminaries in the Clown World pantheon are admired and imitated, but others serve as warnings. Human nature contains a great variety of instinctual desires and impulses, and many of those are nasty. Every spiritual tradition carries warnings about indulging those desires and impulses to excess. In Clown World, one such warning is the example of Virgin.

Virgin is not conspicuously shorter or uglier than average. If he was, he wouldn’t be the Virgin – he’d just be some short or ugly man. To have achieved a place in the Clown World pantheon, Virgin has had to embody a particular spiritual essence. His is the essence of narcissistic masculine self-absorption.

Virgin shuffles along in drab clothing and cheap sneakers, his gaze downcast, his shoulders hunched. Never does he think about the effect that his sullenness has on the other people around him. Nor does he think about how his passive and weak body language repels women. His virginity is, in his mind, 100% the fault of other people.

The idea that virginity is shameful is an old one. It follows from the idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex, and so only men who have been declared worthy may enter. It’s related to the idea that losing one’s virginity makes one a man. Most people understand that sexual reproduction is, to a major extent, a contest, and to get laid is therefore to win.

‘Virgin’ has been used as an insult ever since. It refers to an unworthy man who does not appeal to women. Since the roasties of Clown World will fuck almost anything, a man usually has to have something wrong with him to still be a virgin. But there’s more to Virgin than being simply physically unattractive. He is very different to El Goblino.

The major difference between Virgin and Chad is that Virgin is massively egotistical.

Legends tell of women that were into Virgin but got rejected because they were less than perfect. Virgin is so conceited that anything less than perfection is not up to his standards. He genuinely believes that he is the greatest of all men, and therefore that he deserves the best looking of all women.

Virgin is also heavily neurotic, again for egotistical reasons. He doesn’t know if he prefers Stacy for a summer romance or Waifu for a permanent relationship. He is the archetypal example of chasing two rabbits and losing them both. Fundamentally, his neurotic insecurity follows from being unable to let go of the delusion that he is the centre of the Universe.

Chad causes Virgin to seethe in many ways. It isn’t just that Chad gets laid all the time when Virgin does not. It’s also that Virgin attributes all kinds of false motives to Chad’s masculine rectitude. Where Chad is friendly, Virgin sees him as shallow. Where Chad is brave, Virgin sees him as stupid. Where Chad is honest, Virgin sees him as immoral.

This uncharitable cynicism is the main reason why Virgin is a god of the negative axis. He is an unpleasant character, always complaining, always trying to pull others down to make himself appear better by comparison.

Although a pitiable figure, Virgin’s suffering is all self-inflicted. As such, he serves as a dark figure of warning. In the Clown World pantheon, Virgin represents the dangers of letting one’s ego get out of control. He is entirely capable of achieving great things and becoming a Chad himself, but he is prevented by the fact that he won’t let go of his ego.

Virgin is the Younger God of the Negative Masculine Axis. He is what Wojak can transmute into if he falls off the spiritual path. The everyday Clown World citizen can start losing the spiritual battle if they, like Virgin, fail to keep their egos in check. Virgin serves as a warning of what happens if one doesn’t do enough meditation or smoke enough weed.

If Virgin doesn’t change the path he’s on, he’ll end up like Doomer. Doomer is someone who never figured it out, and who can only see the evil in the world. The main difference between the two is that Virgin, being the Younger God, still has hope that things will change for the better.

The best option for Virgin is to unfuck himself, start getting laid and transmute into Chad. There are two ways to do this, as mentioned above.

The first way is to meditate. Virgin won’t do this because he lacks a spiritual sense, on account of that he thinks of himself as the highest god. As such, he is utterly incapable of understanding his own shortcomings. Lacking self-insight, he behaves in ways that appall others. Meditating would allow him to learn the humility he needs to become like Chad.

The second way is to take spiritual sacraments. As Alan Watts said, “People suffer only because they take seriously what the gods made for fun.” The insight brought about by the use of sacraments such as cannabis, psilocybin, LSD and dimethyltryptamine has the potential to radically alter a person’s spiritual path. Virgin isn’t interested in spiritual sacraments, on account of that he already considers himself perfect.

Any denizen of Clown World who wishes to alleviate their spiritual suffering might win from meditating upon the travails of Virgin. It is often worth reflecting upon the fact that excessive self-regard can repel both women and other people in general. Clown World could be conceptualised as a time when ego runs rampant, and Virgin as an example of the type of man it produces.

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 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.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Struggle Session’?

Sometimes it feels as if Clown World takes the worst aspects of other political systems and combines them all into one infernal whole. From capitalism we have taken soulless, materialistic overconsumption and from Communism we have taken resentment-fuelled narratives of hate. It is from Communism that Clown World has adopted struggle sessions.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Communist revolutionaries formalised their systems of humiliation and abuse into what were known as ‘struggle sessions’. The target of a struggle session would be subjected to ritualised public degradation for an extended time, with the intent of breaking them down and making them submissive towards the Communist Party.

The idea was that certain wrongthinkers harboured opinions that threatened the viability of the Revolution. These counter-revolutionary ideas put everyone at risk, and therefore they had to be driven out. This was considered to be as much for their sake as anyone else’s, because a struggle session might prevent someone from being sent to a labour camp.

In reality, struggle sessions were used to destroy any and all enemies of the Communist Party.

Struggle sessions were banned in China after Deng Xiaoping came to power. But the demand for them didn’t go away. In Clown World they have been reintroduced, under various guises, to workplace training and education. As with Revolutionary China, they achieve the same objective: to eliminate wrongthinkers.

Today’s wrongthinkers are, as then, anyone who disagrees with Communist Party dogma. If you disagree with the dogma that human nature is a blank slate upon which anything can be written, or that evolution stops at the neck, or that past discrimination justifies and necessitates present discrimination, then you are a racist.

‘Racist’ has replaced ‘bourgeoisie’ as the label describing the chief enemy. All rightthinkers know that if we abolished borders, the world’s working classes would come together in an international brotherhood of man, ending suffering forever. People who believe in borders are wrongthinkers motivated by an irrational hatred for their black and brown fellows.

The desire to purge people of wrongthink prompted the Maoist struggle sessions. Since that desire still exists in Clown World, struggle sessions have made a comeback.

In Clown World, struggle sessions are repackaged as “anti-racism seminars”. Today’s leftists don’t give two shits about poor people anymore – they just want to persecute people they hate. Because they don’t care about the poor, their enemies are no longer the rich people in the landlord class. The enemy is any wrongthinker, even (or especially) working-class ones.

These seminars achieve precisely the same goals of the Maoist struggle sessions.

The most obvious way is by humiliating the enemies of the Communist Party. In today’s era of Brown Communism, the enemy is white people. In struggle sessions, white people are told that their moral values cause suffering, and are made to feel shame in an effort to get them to repudiate those values.

White people are told that their racism is the reason for all of the evils of the world. Without it, all of the world’s peoples would live in harmony. As such, anyone harbouring “lingering racist sentiments” has to have them ripped out – again, for their own sake as much as anyone else’s.

Possibly the most insane example of a Clown World struggle session was that inflicted on the staff of Sandia National Laboratories, a contractor involved in constructing America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

These workers were subjected to a struggle session in the guise of diversity training, during which the white males on the staff were made to apologise for their white privilege. They were also made to acknowledge a connection between white male culture and mass killings. This closely mirrors how educated people were made to apologise for all the ills of the world during the Maoist struggle sessions.

According to those running the struggle session, White Men as Full Diversity Partners, a willingness to work hard is white supremacist oppression that causes suffering to people of colour. Resourcefulness, self-confidence and a will to take the initiative are also signs of white supremacy.

Employees in the Seattle City Council have had to go through similar struggle sessions – but only if they were white. Non-white employees, not being the enemy, were exempt. The white ones were taught how they need to make themselves accountable to people of colour, a transparent attempt to humiliate.

Public sector workers in Australia and New Zealand are subjected to struggle sessions in the form of indigenous values training. Although these are presented as dispassionate sociological lessons, their real purpose is to sow doubt and confusion. In this sense, diversity training is the workplace equivalent of Drag Queen Story Hour.

A struggle session in England saw students at Glenthorn High School first segregated by race, following which white children were taught that their heritage was shameful, while black and brown children were taught the opposite. Struggle sessions are now just as common in education as in the workplace.

Ultimately, these struggle sessions are conducted against master morality. Maoism (like all forms of Marxism) is a slave morality, primarily motivated by resentment. Struggle sessions are intended to humiliate the targets of that resentment, so that the slaves feel less ashamed about themselves. In Clown World, the slaves call the tune.

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