Tag: zman

Once Upon a Time in the West

by Uncola for TheBurningPlatform.com

A war can begin slowly.  And quietly.  Decisions are made and strategies implemented as outcomes unfold. Assessments are analyzed; tactics remain fluid and adjustments are tweaked as every action elicits an opposing reaction.  As time progresses, it becomes easier to discern the enemy as the battle lines become more defined.

Originally, I was going to entitle this essay “Enemies of the State”, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how the geopolitics of today resembles a 1960s Spaghetti Western.

The promotional trailer of Sergio Leone’s epic 1968 film, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, alludes to: “the widow, the outlaw, the gunman and the man in search of a name”.   Unless one takes the time to view the entire two hour and forty five minute film, it would be impossible to understand the characters or their individual motives, especially, regarding the protagonist as played by Charles Bronson.

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One World Purple People Leaders

by Uncola for TheBurningPlatform.com

On November 16, 2016 I posted an essay which was actually the conclusion of a three part series, comparing current events with those of the French Revolution and with a touch of Charles Dickens thrown in just for fun.

The concluding essay, entitled:  “The Good, the Guilty and the Guillotine”, addressed various national uprisings that began in 2011 and proposed the possibility of an incipient Purple Revolution taking place in America.  Furthermore, Donald Trump was compared to the Biblical Samson as one who, potentially, could collapse the twin columns of the political Right and Left before a new phoenix arises from the ashes.  And finally, the aftermath of the inevitable forthcoming cataclysms were questioned along with the assertion that no middle ground could be ceded between the opposing forces.

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Misinformation Age

Guest Post by the Zman

In the olden thymes it was much more difficult to be misinformed than it is today, simply due to the fact that information flowed much more slowly that we see today. That meant stupid ideas and nonsense passed from person to person at the speed of foot, not the speed of light. Festus could truly believe that eating cow dung cured gout, but he was not at a university writing papers on it. Those papers were not being spread around the internet. He was simply boring his family with his crackpot ideas and maybe some neighbors.

The flip side of this, of course, is people were much less informed about the world than today for the same reasons. Literacy rates rocketed up with the advent of cheap printed material, but information still moved slowly. You can pack a lot of information in a book, but it still must be toted from one reader to another. It’s entirely possible that the newly literate of the 18th century were not much more informed about the world than the illiterate of the 15th century. Farmer John in colonial Virginia would know more about the Bible and local politics than Farmer Aethelred in the 15th century, but maybe not that much more.

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The Revolt of the Media

Guest Post by The Zman

Way back in the olden thymes, “the media” was the local newspaper, news radio and the evening news on the television. My father would read the paper every evening after dinner, while my mother would watch the evening news. Once in a while my mother would put on the radio and listen to the news channel, but that was rare. If the people in charge wanted to get the attention of the peasants, they had to do it in those small windows when people paid any attention to the news.

We live in a different age, but it is a very new age. We are saturated with media. Young people have no frame of reference so they just assume it has always been thus, but our modern mass media culture is one of those rare things that is truly new. It really was not so long ago when it was easy to be entirely uninformed about the world. It took great effort to be well informed. That’s not to say we are all worldly cosmopolitans, but the world is literally at our fingertips. More important, media is everywhere and it hard to escape it.

This newness means that the people in charge have struggled to put it to their uses. Buying off a few newspaper publishers was easy. Controlling the three TV networks required hardly any effort at all. A free wheeling mass media with millions of bloggers, podcasters and small outlets is a different task. Rounding up the farm’s bull is a hard job, but rounding up all the barn cats is actually much tougher. The former can get you killed, but the latter has a maddening number of variables.

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The Restoration

Guest Post by The Zman

The reaction to Trump’s acceptance speech was predictable, but illuminating all the same. The Left is in a panic because they have evolved into a bizarre identity cult that no longer cares about the practical aspects of politics. Trump’s talk of jobs, trade and culture may as well have been in a foreign language. The so-called Right has evolved into a wish list of policy positions dreamed up by government spongers living in the Imperial Capital. All of the boys and girls of Conservative Inc. are shrieking in terror at the Trump speech, yelling some version of “See? He is no conservative!”

Because Conservative Inc. insists they own the trademark for “conservative”, they insist they get to define what is and what is not “conservative.” Conveniently, everything Trump says is defined as outside the bounds of conservatism, while everything they say is within the bounds of conservatism. Professional conservatives pretty much spend all their time proving they are inside the lines as currently drawn. The death rattle of every mass movement is when they begin to turn all their efforts to rule making and enforcement.

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