One of the socio-political dichotomies we conservatives face is that while we are often described (in our “Republican” guise) as the party of the rich, the fact is that while there may be a few wealthy conservatives, the vast bulk of us are in fact middle-class, nay even working class (as defined in American terms). Donald Trump saw this, and tapped into the latter: the non-rich, conservative and intensely patriotic folks who are exemplified by Readers of this website.
And we are all familiar with the efforts of the ungodly (Leftists, Commies, Wokists — you all know who they are) to censor, muzzle, “cancel” and otherwise stifle our ability to function in today’s world, whether it be by woke banks not wanting to facilitate the “wrong” kind of financial transaction (e.g. buying guns), or media groups not wanting our voices to become public (Facebook bannings, YouTube censorship, de-hosting Deplorable websites such as mine*, etc.) and similar bastardy. As I said, you’re all familiar with the situation so I’m not going to catalogue their misdeeds.
Once again thanks to Insty, I’ve stumbled upon an alternative which may help us sidestep the Left. Read this and feel relieved (as I was) that we may have a way out of this mess.
I was particularly impressed by this company (despite its name**) which gives us a chance to help a truly American industry.
So I’m going to see what happens with New Founding, and I’ll let you know.
*Nobody has tried to silence me — yet — probably because my readership is too small to bother with. Let me assure you, however, that should that day come, Tech Support II has a backup plan which could be enacted within hours, and I’d be back in business, so to speak.
**As a devotee of side-by-side (as opposed to over/under) shotguns, I hesitated a bit, but never mind.
Another problem is that small upstarts (conservative or otherwise) will end up getting bullied out of existence by the “establishment” woke companies. For example “Big Tobacco” has been lobbying congress to mandate “testing” and other regulatory requirements to manufacture and sell vape products.
They do this not because they support the regulations, but because they know it will force the small competitors out of business. Rather than be forced to compete with thousands of mom-and-pop upstarts, they simply use political influence to regulate them out of existence. (See also Preston Tucker and auto manufacturing.)
Thought experiment:
Conservatives tend to be tech-savy. Wokists THINK they are because they have the newest iDevice, but for most the only rack they’ve ever seen was on Pronhub (sic). Many of us also have a collection of few-generation-old computers laying around collecting dust (I personally have two, and I just moved and cleaned out two years ago). What would it take to develop a distributed network of those old boxes as a communications network to disseminate information the PTB don’t want to get out? It may end up looking like usenet, but usenet WORKED. Hell, in the early 1980s I communicated with people in Europe over Earnet using computers far less powerful than I have on my desk right now (although also far bigger, PDP-8s and PDP-11s mostly). I suspect it would be easier than in the olden days, nobody TRACKS landline phone usage anymore (when’s the last time you got a long-distance phone charge?). Using the cable network might prove trickier, but data could probably be piggybacked onto “official” media data.
I’m not a network guy personally, but I bet there are more than a couple of your readers who would have ideas on implementing such a network.
Can’t stop the signal. You can never stop the signal.
Mark D
USENET ran on UUCP, UNIX to UNIX Copy, and in particular the HoneyDANBER version knocked out in a couple of weeks by Peter Honeyman, Dave A Nowitz, and Brian E Redman, in the early 1980s. In 1982 I was running a UUCP server on my desktop at Holmdel, another in my second office at Whippany, and a third from home all three on the UNIX PC. Aside from USENET I also would transfer partially completed work from one to another depending on where I would be next.
This is how I first communicated with Clayton Cramer as we were both on t.p.g, talk dot politics dot guns.
> Conservatives tend to be tech-savy. Wokists THINK they are because they have the newest iDevice,
Nope.
I work in “high tech”. I spend all day with things like AWS, Gitlab (taking a break from fighting with Gitlab pipelines), and security vulnerabilities.
Many of my cow-orkers are center to hard left, and know a shitload about tech.
Remember Parler? Started off “conservative”, and was “hacked” in a matter of weeks by some trans-idiot from Apple. Because they were all fired up about their ideological purity and neglected some security basics.
I’ve had arguments with Libertarians about how email works. They didn’t know what RFC 822 was, wouldn’t know SMTP from IMAP, and think MIME is either something you find downtown in the tourist areas or is a misspelling of MEME.
There are some hard left folks that don’t understand tech at all. But how many Trump voters know the difference between TDMA and CDMA, or even know what one is talking about when one uses those terms (Hint, and OB Sexy Broad: https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1282597/cul-lamarr-01-119943047-use-banner.webp?w=1280&h=853&f=a100d3c25c31852c8b26bd80601f02d4)
I see no evidence that Conservatives are any more “tech savy” than leftists.
Re: Over and Under – pity about the “bridal” leather belts though – might give the wrong impression?
Having recently come off a depressing call with a colleague on the topic of wokist infiltration and subversion of engineering professional organizations, (tl;dr: we’re surrounded), we discussed one of the strategies for overcoming this mess is “build parallel institutions”, with an eye towards rendering the current subverted ones irrelevant.
There are a lot of people who see transient opportunity in the anti-woke backlash, and more than a few scams in play, so caution is merited to distinguish opportunistic exploitation from institution building.
There are weaknesses in the BPI approach. First, the suborned institutions have a certain name recognition and legitimacy cache that ends up getting abandoned. The next, especially with respect to institutions propped up by government advantage and stolen tax funds is that we end up paying to support those interests that directly compete with ours. Finally, the government subsidized institutions are effectively vaccinated against the creative destruction of market forces, virtually guaranteeing their undeserved survival of the consequences of their choices.
There are a lot more problems with “BPI”.
The first is purity feedback loops and constant schisms.
The second is that if you have multiple separate vertical institutions is that you no longer have *a* country, you have multiple countries living side by side on the same pieces of ground. This doesn’t go anywhere good.
The third thing –and this is sort the same as #1–is the tendency for activists to turn media outlets into a Ministry of Truth. The NY times is a lying sack of shitweasels, and not only straight up repeats the lies of their side (which the few Conservative outlets do as well), but also stealth edits (along with Slate and several others) their older articles.
And interesting project would be to build a blockchain that was nothing but sha256 hashes of published news articles, along with a browser plugin that verified that the article you were reading was the same as originally published.
But the biggest problem with building parallel institutions is that they’re subject to take over by charismatic sociopaths who will lie and cheat *and convince their followers it’s the truth*. New institutions tend not to have “antibodies” to this sort of behavior because they haven’t survived long enough–and it’s very hard to do. Witness Nixon and Clinton being elected president. Although one could argue whether Nixon was charismatic.
>>As a devotee of side-by-side (as opposed to over/under) shotguns, I hesitated a bit, but never mind.
Over-under is not so much of a problem for those whose undies are trimmed with McNamara lace.
The AMAC link appears to be valuable. Many thanks.
.
“Shotgun barrels should be side by side like a man and his dog, not over and under like a man and his mistress.” — Kim du Toit
Can’t a man have both?
Like this: https://www.gunsamerica.com/digest/beautiful-four-barrel-gun/
“Mistress is the obvious word for what comes between a mister and his mattress”, said Sara Hoyt when she heard an objection to the word.