OLD THINK

Guest Post by The Zman

The other day, Andrew Torba was scheduled to appear on the Tucker Carlson show so I figured out how to find it off the underground TV system. I no longer have a TV subscription, so I have to rely on the dark web for this stuff. Cord cutters can say what they like about services like Kodi, but it is a hassle compared to regular cable. So much so, in fact, that I rarely watch television. Instead I download movies and TV shows and binge watch when the spirit moves me. I watched Deadwood last month, for example.

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Anyway, I found a stream and tuned in to the show. I did not know when Torba’s segment was scheduled so I had to sit through the whole thing. Watching Tucker interview some old guy, who looked vaguely familiar, I felt like I had gone back in time. I have not watched these shows in a long time. I get my news on-line. I skip the Blue Team – Red Team hooting that makes up political banter in the mainstream press. In fact, I barely notice most of what passes for current events discussion. I just don’t care that much.

The Torba piece was short and I got the sense that Tucker Carlson spends little time on-line. The things Torba said about Twitter and FaceBorg zapping bad-think on a daily basis were obviously news to Tucker. He was genuinely surprised when Torba explained the realities of who controls the internet and the power they have over speech. The reason for this is no one in the mass media understands any of this stuff. They live in the media bubble and the sorts of things we experience on-line are alien to them.

This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the olden thymes when people were coming home every night to a dozen CD’s in the mail from ISP’s offering a free month of internet, the mass media was unaware the internet existed. I recall laughing myself silly one night, watching a couple of airheads on the local news in Boston, talk about “the mysterious underworld of the internet” as if it was the back room at Rick’s Cafe. They carried on like the internet was an opium den. The astonished look on their faces was priceless.

It is another example of the gulf between the people in the mass media and the public. We are at the point now where most everyone under the age of 50 is getting their news and information from on-line sources. The median age for the TV chat shows is mid-60’s and the age for traditional print publications like magazines and journals is 70. The people working the chat show circuit are people who came into the business from newspapers and political magazines. Even the young people on TV are living in the old mindset.

That’s the thing. When you consume news on-line, you scan the high points until you land on something of interest. On a daily basis, I visit maybe fifty sites. I don’t read every word of those sites. Often, I just skim and move on. Social media provides a feed to skim what others are skimming. Information about the world is now a stream and you can dip your cup into as you see fit. Since you can absorb vastly more information by reading, the on-line experience is more informative and more customized to your interests.

News consumption in the information age, for most people now, is on-demand. You take what you want, when you want it, at the speed you want. The old model was an on-supply model. You got what they gave you, on their schedule and their pace. Sitting there watching Tucker and his guests plod through each segment was painful. I no longer have patience for the banter and mugging that is traditional television. I just want the facts and don’t have any interest in their attempts to color it with their personal touch.

It’s not just an age issue, but that is certainly a big part of it. The young people you see in the mass media are just are fogy-ish as an old fogy. They are positive that the old model is still relevant. They create the news and supply it to you in doses they believe you can handle. Meanwhile, most people have consumed the stories via their social media accounts long before they turn up on the chat shows or big shot news sites. People tuned into see Torba inform Carlson about what was happening with speech on-line.

The people in charge get this to some degree. That’s part of why they are berserk for cracking down on dissident speech on-line. Trump was elected because an ad-hoc army on disaffected people went on-line and drove the news cycle, while the people in charge were selling that old hag Clinton on TV chat shows that no one under the age of 60 bothers watching anymore. Their efforts to match this have resulted in memes like “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” where the old thinkers are made to look ridiculous.

It’s tempting to cast this as a bad development. The Fake News phenomenon has simply been met with a guerrilla version of it. Mike Cernovich peddling PizzaGate on twitter is just as corrosive as the New York Times making up stories about Trump. It’s important to remember that the news has always been fake. In the 18th century factions had their newspapers promote false narratives in favor of their faction. It is the source of the Sally Hemmings stuff. Yellow Journalism was a thing before radio existed.

The only question today is the impact of the speed and volume. Fake News delivered by town crier can be mulled over and debated. Propaganda posing as news in the daily paper only comes in once a day. For people glued to their computers and mobile devices, being immersed in a solution of fake news, agit-prop and craven nonsense is a fact of life that is new to our age. Maybe it cancels itself out and all of it becomes background noise or maybe is erodes public trust and begins to set off panics. Or something else.

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BL
BL

No offense to any TBPers that still have pay tv but that is just seriously dumb (OLD THINK).

Ten years without pay tv and you could not pay me to go back. Zman could easily stream Tucker Carlson off youtube for free, nothing “dark web” about it. There is a WORLD of free viewing content and most every news channel in the world is free on the net.

Most older people tend to stick with the easy-peasy, channel up/channel down remote control world of pay-out-the-ass tv. They believe the alternative methods to be too hard, not true. If I can do it, any other maroon could do it.

Ozum
Ozum

Ya, if you have hi speed internet. Us ultra-rurals no got.

BL
BL

Ozum- I have high speed internet at my doomstead in the middle of BFE nowhere.

Hammer's Thor

Ozum, we live in the middle of nowhere, and have outstanding internet. It took us some effort, and some investment (about $1,000), but we now communicate with an ISP via a dish that is line-of-sight to their tower, and can stream youtube, netflix, and even use our phone with it. Have not had “pay tv” for years. What a stupid thing “pay tv” is anyway. You are paying a fee to criminals to send lies into your house, and the lies come with massive amounts of commercials. They should be paying YOU to import their crap into your home.

yup
yup

I was a maroon back in highschool. Our school colors were maroon/white and the nickname was “the maroons”. SFA Austin, Tx. I didn’t know shit then and even less now. How could I wind up going so far down the rabbit hole? I can thank the ubiquity of the internet and access to data in a nanosecond. My poor brain operates in microseconds. I need a linear thought with no branches. You can call me a maroon and I wouldn’t be aware enough to be offended.

Laters beeshez

Yuppers

Anonymous
Anonymous

SFAustin was a class school you moran. I know because I said I went to SFA and folks were impressed until I said SFA in Beanville, Texas not Austin, TX.

BSHJ
BSHJ

Why even watch the news…..everything is so very depressing, I think it is worse now than when Obama was in office…..society and conservative ideals just going down at a faster pace.

musket
musket

They only put the content on the tube that THEY want you to see and it is of zero consequence to anybody but THEM……

rainbird
rainbird

I watch the evening news to get my daily dose of amusement & outrage. Remember the drinking game “Bob”? Howabout substituting “Russian meddling” for “Bob”. I also like to count how many times our local news suit uses the words “Authorities” or “Lawmakers”.

warts
warts

Proof read much?

drhardy84
drhardy84

I’m 64 and quit watching cable or any other tee-vee years ago. I rarely bother with newspapers, especially ones like our local rag up here in northern Vermont that gets at least half its purported news content from the WAPO, with the bylines. And the Tube is a wholly-owned Goolag subsidiary. I don’t do any “social media,” like FaceBerg or Twatter, and mainly just listen to the scanner and the shortwave. While reading, mostly history and the stuff I gotta read for my very late-starting alternative grad-school degree.

What current news I see mainly comes from a half-dozen blogs and the stuff my family down in the Belly of the Beast sends me (Maffachufetts). The MSM and too many innernet sites seem to specialize in spectacularizing bad nooz, that which gets the haht pumping faster and the rage building up just as quickly. Who needs it? Not me, not at my advanced age of senility and decrepitude.

Too much stuff going on in this little town in meatspace, daily; all the excitement I need. Planning Commission, gun club, parish, Legion and VFW posts, neighbors, et. al. No need for Tucker Carlson or his ilk out here while making friends and allies for the coming shitstorms.

Hammer's Thor

Yep. I like the moniker FaceBorg… that is the truth. I’ve been saying (to myself, mostly) that decentralization is the only way to circumvent the PTB. Decentralizing food production, energy production, information technology and access, etc. Most importantly, really, is our access to information, which FaceBorg and Google are now openly and proudly censoring. The MSM no longer even pretends to do journalism, they are puppets (or puppet masters, sometimes I wonder) for the elites on both sides of the aisle.

Everyone needs to become familiar with the term MESH Networks. For nearly nothing, you can pick up a used computer (usually free if you can catch someone before they throw their “ancient” 3 year-old desktop or laptop away, because it “just wont keep up anymore”), strip out the hard drive (which is likely laced with malware and viruses), and load a free, fresh OS such as Linux Mint, or Ubuntu, or Arch (for you Linux snobs), or any of the other flavors of Linux or FreeBSD onto it and use it as an information server. Get useful data on it, link to others via a MESH Network (great article here about that: https://greycoder.com/gnunet-circumvents-censorship-with-open-source-p2p-networking/) and keep the information flowing.

FWIW, anyone using Windows or iOS now is a moron anyway, so switch to Linux if you want any semblance of privacy. Okay, so maybe you’re not a moron, but you just don’t understand that Linux is better for very nearly everything, period. Software is free and open source, no subscriptions for software (how much do you now pay for subscription fees for Adobe and Microsoft products every year, hmmm? $1,000 a year? $5,000 a year?) Linux works better than Windows or iOS, is free, ad-free, and can even be configured to look just like your iOS or Windows screen so you won’t feel like you are having to learn a brand new system (perish the thought).

A MESH network can be easily constructed with your brand new (used) free computer, with free software, using a $20 router loaded with (free) open-source router software (it’s really not that hard, folks), and maybe an antenna so you can link to others in your area. MESH Networks, done correctly (again, this is easy) can cover thousands of square miles, and be completely independent of what we know as the internet. Basically an alternative internet, without giant mega corporations deciding what is appropriate for others to see (you know, like videos of patriotic Americans supporting the 2nd Amendment, protesting wild breaches of the 4th Amendment, etc.)

Stop paying these people to poison your minds (and your food). Decentralize. Communicate. Train. Resistance is NOT futile.

drhardy84
drhardy84

Excellent advice. A DuckDuckGo or Quant search using the Brave browser (Chrome and Goolag stuff are bad news, as, increasingly, is Firefox) for “mesh networks” will yield a lot of information. There are also decent books on it which can be downloaded to various, properly secured, tablets and phones. Or see if your local library has them or can get them. Mesh networks have been making strides in Second- and Third-World regions, which is what our overlords and masters seem to be driving us toward.

Also worthwhile to read through the information here, for your existing home or office IT infrastructure:

https://securityinabox.org/en/

I highly recommend dumping everything associated with Goolag, Twatter, FaceBerg, etc.; ditto Winblows and Microslop products; for Linux pioneers, try Mint and Ubuntu flavors. Hardcore buggers may prefer Arch, Gentoo, and also search out some of the distros designed to run on older hardware; take a look at them all here:

https://distrowatch.com/

Bear in mind that some of the recommended email and VPN services at greycoder’s pages have subscription or other costs associated with them, but still, nothing like the relentless hammering every year from Microsoft and Adobe and ISPs like Comcast.

I’m running CentOS, Ubuntu Studio, and OpenBSD, behind an offshore VPN and secured router, with firewalls enabled on all machines. I use LibreOffice, the Brave browser, fastmail for normal home use, unseen.is for other stuff. And the DuckDuckGo and Quant search engines. I also have Whonix with Tor running on all machines, several up-to-date Tails sticks (with persistence enabled) and various encrypted sticks and hard drives.

Small first steps; look into Linux distros to replace your current Windows or Apple setups and look at mesh networking per Hammer’s Thor’s information.

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