Saturday, October 31, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: BlizzCon 2015 Hype

It's Saturday. By this time next weekend, I'll be watching BlizzCon remotely because I won a Virtual Ticket in a giveaway a few weeks ago.

Yeah, I'm excited. Specifically, I'm keen on World of Warcraft: Legion and the Warcraft movie followed by Overwatch. The other games I can catch up with later as my interests direct me (likely via my friends, acquaintances, and associates), and I'll follow the Twitter feed alongside the panel video feeds hoping for the bombshells to drop good and hard.

In the meantime, I'm relying on the aforementioned folks to fill in the blanks that the official coverage will inevitably leave, and I look forward to weeks and weeks of podcasts and live streams yammering on about how this is cool and that sucks harder than a black hole and yadda yadda yadda.

Until BlizzCon then, LOK'TAR OGAR! FOR THE HORDE!

(Note: This was meant to be posted on this date, but due to an unforeseen access outage was delayed until the 3rd of November, 2015.)

Friday, October 30, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: Overwatch Hype

So, Blizzard started the Closed Beta for their First-Person Shooter, Overwatch. As of this post, I do not have access to the Beta, but I know people who have and I watch plenty of streamers who did. I like what I see so far, but I am disappointed that those playing the game have been slow to comprehend one fundamental fact: that you can change your Hero whenever you're in the Spawn Room, without any limit to numbers per side or numbers per game. (You can have multiples of the same Hero on both sides at the same time.)

Instead, I see a lot of people thinking that they have to fulfill a specific role throughout a match as if this were Heroes of the Storm (or some other MOBA) or speak of "main" and "alt" Heroes as if this were World of Warcraft. That's not the correct approach to Overwatch.

You are expected to swap Heroes to meet the tactical demands at hand.

Heroes have distinct suites of abilities. Accurately reading the tactical situation, and then swapping to the Hero that best meets that situation, is something that players are expected to do to win consistently.

Starting with one team composition and stubbornly insisting upon it will lose to a team composition that flexes along with the evolving gameplay state. That is why this Beta has a native voice chat client (ala Destiny), so groups can coordinate in real-time using the most efficient means (voice) at hand.

You are expected to coordinate actions, including Hero swaps, to win the match.

As the Beta goes forward, and successive waves of players join the fun, I expect this to become the best practice that the community promotes once the idea achieves critical mass and becomes widely accepted.

(Note: This was meant to be posted on this date, but due to an unforseen access outage, it was not posted until the 3rd of November, 2015.)

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Narrative Warfare: The Enemy's Playbook

This link from Cryptome came across my Twitter feed late last night, and when I looked at it I knew that this post was to come.

I want you to look at that link and bookmark it. Archive it if you're particularly worried about it going down the Memory Hole. It is important to note the links to the UK's GCHQ agency and their involvement in the same sort of shenanigans that the US's NSA is now known to do thanks to Edward Snowden, but I want you to scroll down and start reading the body of the page. I want you to read the techniques for online information manipulation and control with an eye to the forums, subreddits, blogs, comment sections, etc. that you frequent (or did in the past) and see if you recognize any of them being used.

I do. You see, this is not just something political campaigns do, but rather something that other interested parties--some of whom are not paid to do it--employ, such as the Social Justice cult. They do it for the same reasons that their counterparts working for real power players do: to take and wield real power. Influence is not something to laugh off; if you're not actively defending your brain via critical thinking (i.e. the Trivium Method), then you're vulnerable to being influenced in this manner.

These are tactics. They are used to pursue a strategic objective. That objective has to do with logistics, specifically denying the use of media by opponents--that would be us--to contradict and destroy the Narrative. Narrative Warfare is about information, and so it is not surprising at all that there would be techniques intended to manipulate what information is received, where, when, and how. (We already know why.)

The enemy's playbook lies open. Master it before they master you.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Narrative Warfare: Message Control Includes Silencing Others

Brietbart had a timely column on the removal of comments sections yesterday. The big reason is that these sections allow readers to call the media outlet out on its bullshit, bullshit often done to wage (you got it) Narrative Warfare. Vox Day also posted about this today. Respectively, they had rather poignant statements on the matter:

From the Breitbart article by Allum Bokhari:
It’s no accident that so many of the loudest voices against online comments sections are also political zealots. Jessica Valenti, Arthur Chu, Tauriq Moosa, Anita Sarkeesian: all have come out against comment sections. This isn’t an accident, of course. Psychologists have long been aware that political extremists have the most negative reactions to contrary information. Combine that with a disdain for free speech, a core cultural authoritarian value, and you get a frantic rush to remove the opinions of ordinary people.

But there are also more sinister, elitist motivations. A study conducted by The Washington Post and USA Today found that readers who viewed articles with comments sections were more likely to develop a negative opinion of the news media. Curiously, this effect was seen even when commenters praised the article in question. In other words, when the opinions of journalists and the opinions or ordinary members of the public are placed close together, it leads readers to question the competence of the mainstream media. What horror!

Another study found that reading assertive, aggressive comments could actually sway the opinions of readers. “Don’t read the comments,” warned Ars Technica, “they can make you mistrust real experts.”

It’s a piece of advice that captures the war on comments sections perfectly. Having initially cheered on the death of the “gatekeepers of information,” cultural elites are now scrambling to reinstall those barriers. Too late, they have discovered that people don’t always agree with them – and now they want to push that disagreement into the wilderness of the internet.

And Vox Day's post:
As most of you are aware, I am very pro-comments and pro-talking back. And while I have had to go to a higher level of moderation of late due to an unfortunate incident or two, it's always been my intention to return to unregistered commenting. Which I am doing so now.

However, I would strongly recommend continuing to comment with a registered name as any attempts to abuse the more open system will be met with an immediate response, which will include, but is not limited to, turning the registration requirement on for extended periods of time without warning. This is the last time that I will announce the status; in the future it will be simply turned on, or off, as the moderators and I see fit.

Free speech is important. So is complete anonymity. Respect and support that by refraining from trolling, from "just having fun", from "making a point", from "playing a role", and just as importantly, from responding to the occasional troll.


Notice the contrast? The folks waging Narrative Warfare are attempting silence those who would contradict the Narrative because of deleterious effects upon the Narrative done via talking back. You see the same thing with framing such talk-back as "harassment" while those who actually do it (proving Vox's Third Law of SJWs: SJWs Always Project) libel and slander those talking back and calling out their bullshit. All of it is meant to silence the Other--the targets of the Narrative--and that, if you know your history, should chill you to the bone.

It leads to genocide.

Most people are averse to killing unless they or theirs is immediately and directly threatened with death or similar violence. Getting them to kill on command takes a hell of a lot of mind-fucking, something that everyone familiar with the military and the Basic Training regime has a first-hand account of experiencing. Yes, even if there is long-standing animosity it still takes significant mind-fucking to turn that into a kill command. This is the role of propaganda, to lie--to gaslight--until the targeted population is conditioned to act as their masters desire.

The win condition for a population targeted by Narrative Warfare is to be conquered or destroyed, and the most competent practitioners always devise their campaigns so that either result is wholly acceptable. Getting the word out now prevents ganking later, which is why silencing those a Narrative Warfare campaign designates as Other is always a tell that (a) such a campaign exists and (b) it's a lead-up to the enslavement or extermination of the targeted population.

Narrative Warfare is still warfare. Just because you're not being shot at now doesn't mean you're not intended as a bullet magnet.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Narrative Warfare: How It's Contested on Twitter

Remember that wage gap meme? Well, it's a Narrative Warfare front. You can--and should--use Dialectic and Rhetoric to counter it when encountered. This below is a Dialectic counter-attack, but it's posted to Twitter by a user employing Rhetoric; it's an instructive image intended to educate the reader on what the facts are, and thereby convince via reason of what the truth of the issue is.



However, this follow-up shows where the one-two punch is, as this is Rhetoric.



Do you see the difference now? The first hits the mind. The second hits the feels. Now do you get how this works in everyday practice? You feel-fight them into that "teachable moment", and then come at them with facts and other reason-based avenues because that's when they will receive them. This is what they do to you, only their "facts" are frauds (and that's assuming they bother with faking the facts), but having the truth on your side--substance solidifying style--your counter-attacks have weight behind them and (coupled with patience and determination) will bring victory.

Monday, October 26, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: The Problems With RPGs

The problems with RPGs stem from a misunderstanding of their history and origins.

Role-Playing Games are wargame derivatives (made clear in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World), wherein the player runs a single unit--an individual, named, character--instead of a unit or an army. When the medium works within that space, they are potent and deliver experiences that cannot be had otherwise.

However, many of those in RPG development (regardless of medium) mistakenly think that these are literature derivatives and then get frustrated when they apply the tropes of literature (Literary or Genre) and fail to get the expected results.

Games are media of active and interactive participation. Role-Playing Games are media of Virtual Life Experience because they put the player into a situation that they cannot experience at all, or are highly unlikely to experience. This trait allows players to safely encounter that situation (especially unreal ones) and deal with it using the limited resources--starting with information--at their disposal.

RPGs justify their existence by this approximation of reality.

The reason that literature and its structures are inappropriate for this medium is because the partaking of a narrative is, by necessity, a passive thing. It's a one-way communication method, where the creator/presenter talks to the audience using rhetoric to get his message across, and it's roots in persuasive speech makes its applicability to gaming exactly what it is now: the thing you do to learn how to play, and then put away to engage with gameplay.

RPGs are a totally different thing. The essence of RPGs is the same as the essence of enterprise: to determine what the situation is, define what the solution is, assess what is at hand to bring about the solution, plan the solution, and then execute the plan.

Gaming is the same as war, business, or politics. Narrative creation does not apply.

You are in the moment, experiencing reality as it is, and it is on you to succeed or fail at the objectives that you determine for yourself. It's why the inclusion of narrative tropes is so often taken as cheating, as damaging the authenticity of the experience, because beating the game by exercise of superior skill to overcome opposition is the fucking point. Beating the villain right away, defeating his schemes before they get off the ground, or otherwise doing things that--in a narrative work--are considered bad storytelling is the fucking point.

The power of the medium comes from this emergent phenomenon, when too many RPG developers would outright negate the players being intelligent and savvy by undoing their victories via narrative device (or other outright cheating), and if they would instead embrace this (and make their games to accomodate it), the current stagnation of the RPG media as a commercial entity would end and the truly wonderful things that once were commonplace will return in a heartbeat.

Embrace the truth of the RPG medium, and you will profit greatly.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Narrative Warfare: Why It's Bad For You

So, why "The Narrative"?

If you wish to become a skilled writer, especially a writer of fiction, you're going to develop your skills in the craft of writing. As it is a craft, there are best practices and experience-confirmed techniques that are proven to work reliably. With fiction, and also with non-fiction that uses some fiction-writing practices, your primary concern is with the quality of your narrative. Fiction writing, both Literary and Genre, has a lot of practitioners and those people talk among themselves. They have for generations, and publishing houses encourage this discourse because they want to make profits, which they off-load by having the writers do this work on their own (or in academia). The Internet accelerated this trend, resulting in sites and pages on what the Seven Point Story Structure is, how it works, and why.

When you create a story, you create a narrative, and creating a narrative starts with your conclusion. Then you work backwards, starting with the hook to catch the attention of the audience and draw them into your narrative and following with the narrative beats required to keep audiences engaged until they arrive at your conclusion. Character and Plot are tools used to drive the audience through the emotional manipulation you use to bypass their reason and push (or pull, or both) them into accepting the conclusion as valid. The bulk of developing your craft as a writer of fiction (etc.) is developing the acumen required to create and sustain the illusion of plausibility--"verisimilitude"--that is necessary to achieve the goal of satisfying the audience.

That's fine for fiction. That's absolutely terrible for anything with real-world consequences, such as policy decisions, or purporting to be a true and faithful presentation of fact (which is my bailiwick as a historian). Competent government--especially self-government--requires that people be provided with all relevant information. (It also requires that they be competent thinkers, but that's another topic entirely.) Filtering what those people receive because it does not conform to the conclusion you want those people to arrive at is an act of fraud; you are committing theft by way of deception, with the intent to steal real wealth and influence from them, and you're brain-washing them--gaslighting them--into doing it to themselves. That is unforgivable.

Narrative Warfare is the perversion of Art for the sake of Power.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Narrative Warfare: The System In Action

I had another topic on my mind, but that I can hold until tomorrow. This needs your attention here and now. I'll quote the description:

Years from now you'll be telling your children that the internet used to be a place of free speech, free expression, and free thought. Of course after you explain that you'll be put into a camp for telling stories of the "before time".




This video goes into how the system of Narrative Warfare requires various actors and interests to interact in order to get the agenda across and implemented. Notice the common themes, which exist in previous iterations of the system:
  • The system has multiple actors and interests--at least two--involved due to the need for expendable dupes to do the grunt work before they take the fall and actual power players to provide the means to actually get shit done. In other words, Outer Party/SA and Inner Party/SS. Three or more parties are common, with a government-business axis using Divide-and-Rule management schemes such as the current Social Justice cult and traitorous immigration policies.
  • The actors are allies--not friends, not teammates--of convenience due to complimentary objectives in the moment. Once the moment passes, these allies become rivals or enemies and will turn upon each other to determine who controls the system thereafter; these are the times when alignments get remade, and those who are useful idiots exposed as such and get their own Night of the Long Knives. (Another tell of disposable idiots is that they think their allies are friends.)
  • The system is constrictive and, when run competently, plays the long game. Today's useful idiots are tomorrows traitorous threat, against which a new cadre of useful idiots are recruited to destroy them. This plays out in the manner of Sun Tzu's method of managing rival states via shifting alliances, a system England used so often it gained the "Perfidious Albion" moniker.
  • The system's goal is total control, reducing the targeted people to drones executing the system's will. This is why parties seeking objectives other than total control will inevitably be targeted as threats by the party with total control and destroyed by the very system they once served. It is also why people who think this system is benign, benevolent, or irrelevant will be the first ones targeted by it.
The system uses the media to tell you a story, a story told with language and other techniques intended to manipulate what you think by moving your emotions to where they want you to go. It works; advertising proves it, because they use Narrative Warfare techniques routinely to sell you crap you don't need by making you feel like shit unless you use the thing or service they're shilling. Getting out from under this system matters, and until you do the threat of being ground under by it remains a viable threat to you and all you care about.

Friday, October 23, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: The Problem With Players

(Note: If you're here for Narrative Warfare, come back tomorrow.)

Alternative Chat, a World of Warcraft blog about stuff that isn't all about raiding, had a nice long post about how the Looking For Raid feature turned out to create results contrary to what the developers intended. She agrees with critics of the feature that it is unfit for purpose, surplus to requirements, and therefore should be removed from the game altogether.

There's a lesson here. Allow me to summarize the relevant points:
  • "Looking For Raid" (LFR) is a random matchmaker queuing system for the large-group content in the game, the raids, aimed for players whose real life commitments don't allow them to participate as a member of a raid team. A secondary concern was to raise participation in raid content to justify its development expense to the bean counters.
  • LFR was intended as a "tourist mode", deliberately meant to be easy enough for an uncoordinated and largely incompetent group of players to blunder through the encounters and still succeed. The rewards are lesser than with proper, formal raiding to compensate for the ease.
  • Most players don't care about the context behind the scenario premise of the raid. They neither know, nor care to know, why their character is in that place, fighting that opposition, or acquiring that treasure. They just want the gear.
  • The developers failed to recognize the error, and then compounded it by placing quest items for Legendary treasures and currencies for improving existing gear into these modes of play. The raiding community, operating on a "Best Or Benched" paradigm, immediately made running these modes mandatory to maintain one's position on the raid team and turned an already bad social mix into a toxic one.
  • Performance, outside of the day of the weekly reset or the day after, plummets in both frequency and quality of participation to the bottom.
  • Superior alternatives that actually work to solve the actual problems are available, and should be favored by eliminating LFR and diverting the attention to those alternatives.
So, what is the lesson?

Uncaring people will take the most direct and efficient means to the end possible.

The end is power. The tool is gear. The means to get it are by crafting, raiding and dungeons, Player-vs.-Player (PVP), and questing. Of those, raiding is where the best gear for all but instanced PVP purposes can be found so players focus on the route that gets the job of gearing up done fastest. The reason? It's something the developers, after 10 years, still haven't figured out despite it being a fucking meme:

The real game begins at endgame

The players, as demonstrated by behavior over time, want a gameplay state that removes as much randomness--as many elements that are out of player control--as possible. They want only skill and gear to matter, which is why the ideal way to structure World of Warcraft would be to take levels out entirely, make raiding the way to gear up, and then make PVP to control strategic resources to advance the war campaign.

This is hardly confined to World of Warcraft. The player mentality is applicable to every RPG ever made, electronic and tabletop alike, much to the dismay of developers, designers who haven't yet figured out that they're not making fucking literature. Players don't care about context unless it directly and immediately applies to what they're doing or what they're after. They're in Working The Job mode, and when you're on the job what matters is only that information which directly applies to your situation then and there. Everything else just gets in the way.

If you want players to care, make it relevant to what they're doing here and now.

And I mean "directly", as it "fist to the face" direct. The lore matters when not knowing it means that the players fail at the task before them, and they will care about the task when there are no better alternatives to the power that they seek. That is the secret to a successful product in the RPG field: you make knowing the lore a load-bearing pillar to the players succeeding at attaining and wielding the power that they seek. That this is somehow greeted with shrieks like that of a Pod Person spotting a norm, after 40 fucking years of RPGs being a thing, makes me wonder just how intelligent some folks really are. I'm saying it because it works, reliably, regardless of genre or participants or medium.

And that's the problem with players: they're people, and not literary characters or robots, which is why so many RPGs in all media fail to satisfy them.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: I GOT THE RING! I GOT THE RING!

No long post today. Nothing terrible involved, philosophical, or anything like that. Nope. This post, short and sweet as it is, is here to remind you (and me) about why we do this.

You see, tonight I finally got the Legendary Ring for my main character in World of Warcraft. I kept at it even when I couldn't raid with my guild, when the lappy had heat issues, and I got frustrated gearing up before Tanaan Jungle. I stuck with it, knowing what was waiting when I got there, and tonight I got there.

So right now I'm thrilled and pumped and otherwise riding high. A big expansion-long objective finally finished. That's why I do this: for the satisfaction of accomplishing the objectives that matter.

Narrative Warfare: We Have Been Here Before

One of the best fictional stories that hits upon Narrative Warfare is a short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursela K. LeGuin. Go read it if you haven't; you shouldn't have any problems finding a copy of the full text these days. Come back when you do that. What comes below assumes that you've read the story and grok what its says.

The forsaken child, the one who is neglected and allowed to suffer so that everyone else may know and enjoy the utopian society that makes the titular community the envy of others, is not quite the abstraction that some would say of this element of the story. It's easy to see today, here and now, just by getting on the train or bus and silently obsevering the underclass as they go about their lives as if invisible by everyone else. The forsaken child, deliberately and willfully sacrificed to procure and secure the prosperity and peace for the rest, retains its power as a rhetorical device because it has a direct real world referent to rest upon (and that's without references actual human sacrifice practices).

However, I think there is a superior alternative for those seeking to establish such a dystopia--and Omelas is a dystopia--and I think that would be to turn the position of the sacrifice wholly on its head. The forsaken child approach neglects the real power to be had in capturing the power released in public worship of idols and icons. So, what if the chosen sacrifice is instead transformed by the power of isolation coupled with the control over information and some trauma-based mind-control straight out of MK Ultra into a living hero, an icon to be worshipped and adored, but never recognized as a living individual with hopes and dreams and failings of their own. In other words, a celebrity icon.

What if this celebrity was not just some living idol brought out to do certain functions as part of a public civic cult, through which the ruling cadre exercised its power over the population through their emotional manipulations (public rituals often have a sacred drama element, which is a literal use of narrative storytelling to communicate mythology to an audience as a Narrative Warfare system) coupled with firm information control? What if this celebrity was considered to be more-than-human in all ways, and the population conditioned to not tolerate failures to live to those expectations, so the victims become complicit in the victimization of the tool used to keep the population in line?

Yes, that's what my manuscript attempts to address.

Does this idea intrigue you? Good. That's what a work of speculative fiction should do: give you a good hook, tell you a good story, tell it well, and use the speculative elements to bring a big idea to your attention that otherwise would be missed. If you're interested in seeing what I've got written properly finished, now's the time to speak up.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Narrative Warfare: Turning It On Its Head

I'm talking about the telling of a story wherein one of the themes is the use of rhetorical systems of emotional manipulation to control and manipulate targeted populations. In other words, a story featuring Narrative Warfare as a major theme. Like it or not, but it is a fact acknowledge since the Ancient World that some people cannot be taught (the requirement for effective use of Dialectic) and so one who would persuade them must do so via their emotions, and that is where a great and terrible power resides. It is why Homer put the poet over the priest in importance, a sentiment echoed later by Plato and Aristotle.

If you want a challenge as an author, write a story about Narrative Warfare.

I've got a manuscript that takes up this very challenge, but I am at the point where I need an editor; I am at the limit of my skill, and I know enough about my skill to recognize that I know what I don't know about what I can do, but I lack the means to engage one. (Yes, this is necessary, and I don't know if I can successfully beg for the means via crowd-funding.)

It has been done, successfully, but it is usually in the form of a comedy about U.S. Presidential campaign shenanigans. The (as of this post) upcoming Sandra Bullock comedy, Our Brand Is Crisis, is the most recent version but there have been dramatic works that addressed this matter in the past. (Network is the most notable example in popular media.) As such, most successful work of this sort doesn't go far into the realm of fantastic genre fiction; even Marvel's stuff that leans that way remains with one foot firmly in reality.

However, the further away from the real world one goes in fictional media, the less likely one is to find an effective--nevermind successful--work that addresses the matter despite using all of the tools and working with all of the tropes. (Just look for people inspired by, saying, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.) I intend to fix that, and I encourage others to make the attempt. Science Fiction and Fantasy, in particular, are well-equipped to take up and master this challenge.

Fiction creates mythology. Mythology explains the world.

That is why Narrative Warfare works. Its foundation is its use of Mankind's acumen at storytelling to create mythologies--false ones, but effective nonetheless--in order to create a false world (a paradigm) through which they can and do manipulate us. By defining what is real, they gaslight us, and if we cannot defend ourselves and defy that fraudulent mythology, they get their mind control through their information control. Show me that story, put into a SF/F context, and then tell me a fucking good story. Do that, and you will have not only a hit but a classic on your hands.

That's why I'm going for it.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

My Life in Fandom: I Am a Star Wars Fan, Like My Father Before Me

I've been a Star Wars fan since I was a child. My father took me to see the original film in the theater during a midday matinee at the Terrace in Robbinsdale, and I'd been a faithful fan ever since. Nevermind "Generation X", I'm Generation Star Wars (Original Trilogy). All that merch in the late '70s and early '80s? Guess who was part of that target audience? Yours truly.

Yes, I was excited for The Phantom Menace, and I realized a lot of long-held wishes with that film as well as Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith despite their flaws. (And if you think the Original Trilogy isn't flawed, either you're not paying attention or you're a child.) So of course I'm excited for The Force Awakens. Here, let me embed the official trailer so you can watch it yet again:


But, aside from hoping that I get something even better than the existing films, I have hope that this new trilogy (and the upcoming stand-alone films) reignites something else near and dear to me: playing in Star Wars tabletop RPG campaigns.

I've tried the d20 System games. I know that the official license is with Fantasy Flight Games right now, and they're doing something interesting with their games, but I remain loyal to the original d6 System. With some changes to accommodate the current canon, especially as it regards The Force and its powers, you have a game far superior to the later versions all around.

(And there's the various video games, which I'll talk about at length another time.)

So, while I await the release of The Force Awakens, I remain hopeful that J.J. Abrams will deliver and therefore says only this:

May the Force Be With You.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Narrative Warfare: Where to Start Self-Educating?

Reading my blog posts alone isn't sufficient to get up to speed on Narrative Warfare. You're going to have to do some work, most of which consists of study and application, and that means looking for a good place to start. Well, you start with the Trivium Method at Trivium Education, but after that? Background information, of course, and reading the basics behind the system.

This is not an exhaustive list.

What is below is a selection of books on my shelf that informed my development of this idea I call "Narrative Warfare". Call it a partial bibliography if you like.
  • Alinsky, Saul.Rules For Radicals.
    Note: This is the book the lays out the foundation of the current system of Narrative Warfare.
  • Bernays, Edward. Propaganda.
    Note: Lays out the hows and whys that would lead to systematic narrative implementation.
  • Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent.
    Note: Shows how central the Mainstream Media is to the system.
  • Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
    Note: Shows how the system operates as a public-private partnership to avoid accountability and enhance deniability, as well as shows to what ends the system is actually employed.
  • Quigley, Carrol. Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World In Our Time. Note: Shows that the parties for whom the system works are not new.
  • Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Note: It's Warfare. Duh. Also, Clausewitz and Machiavelli have works on the matter that should be read.
  • Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince. Note: The system is meant to work for a political potentate, albeit as a class instead of a specific individual, so reading this helps see the whys behind the hows.
I'll get into individual books and other sources in some detail down the road, according to your feedback.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Vlog Recommendation: Sargon of Akkad

YouTube user Sargon of Akkad is a British man, of a liberal--not progressive--bent who regularly makes videos commenting on American and British affairs, as well as related matters of interest to him. He's best known for his series "This Week In Stupid", which I embed below. He's given to sarcasm and mockery, and his politics and mine are not arm-in-arm, but I know a man who values freedom and liberty when I see one and that's why I like this guy- and recommend him to you.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

My Life as a Writer: Process Talk

My next project is making progress. I'm making time to put together the sort of outline that will help me when I'm stringing words together, to help me focus on what I want a reader to get out of this, as a means of improving myself as a writer over my past performances. I can write well, but when I get into a flow state I have a tendency to go off my outline and that means wasted time in revision and rewriting, and that is where I'm going wrong right now. I need to curb this down to its useful limits.

The narrative is a simple one--a man makes contact with a friend he'd not seen in a while, finds friend in the thrall of a cult, cult sees him as a threat and tries to kill him, man gets allies and collaborates on the rescue attempt, attempt goes wrong for man, and decides to go after the cult for revenge--but the usual form is to have a young man as the protagonist and make it run more like a Lifetime movie.

Nope.

This is, technically, a novel in my Future History SF/F series. It's set before the Apocalypse, before everything went weird, but the protagonist is going to be consistent with his post-Apocalypse form. Ken is the protagonist. Hugo is the friend. There are ex-wives, girlfriends, criminal conspiracies great and small, and the sort of Fuck You And Die problem solving that Ken's good for. I'm aiming for 40-50K words, which technically is a novel (but often regarded as a novella due to Fat Fantasy Inflation). I'll post excerpts when they're ready.

Until them, just this:
"You have a lot of nerve coming here, after you cut and ran on him when he needed you most, you lying cunt. Why shouldn't I kill you where you stand and throw your fat-assed corpse on the pile here?"

Friday, October 16, 2015

Narrative Warfare: You Saw It at the Dem Debate

If you watched the U.S. Democratic Party's debate for its candidates for the U.S. Presidency, then you likely followed-up by seeking the media reactions the morning and day after. If you did, then you should have noticed how CNN was in the tank for Hillary Clinton despite CNN's own poll showing massive support for Bernie Sanders.

If you think there's a problem at the top, you're right.

Time-Warner owns CNN. Time-Warner donates significantly to Hillary's campaign. Time-Warner, therefore, has a stake in making Hillary the nominee for the Presidency and has no problems using its ownership rights over CNN to increase the odds of that investment--because that's what donations really are, investments into an enterprise in return for a stakeholder position--paying off. This media outlet flat-out lied about Hillary's performance, down to putting a CIA asset on the panel of questioners and moderators, to make this happen.

This is hardly unusual. It's standard practice, as Herman & Chomsky noted in Manufacturing Consent decades ago, and therefore not illegal until it meets the standard of defamatory slander or libel. Half-truths, edited audio or video, etc. to create the desired Narrative is well within the statutory code for media outlets purporting to be news outlets. Mainstream news is really entertainment. It's why there is no difference between Entertainment Tonight and NBC Nightly News, right on down to using green screen tech to fake being on location.

The story promoted about Hillary Clinton is not reality.

Not that any other candidate is clean; their campaigns are all doing Narrative Warfare, so it's more a matter of who's lying least and how than who is or is not lying to get their way. You can't rely on the mainstream media to inform you properly; each corporation has a stake in the outcome, so they will slant their coverage to favor who they want to win. (Yes, this applies to the GOP as much as it does to the Dems, and the shut-out of all other parties is the same thing on a larger scale.)

Don't expect a lot of alternative media to do the job either. Some are incompetent, some are compromised, and some are astroturf fronts. Only a few are properly independent as well as committed to proper journalistic best practices, so I would--again--recommend that you development the Trivium Method so that you can rely on your own prowess of mind to sort through this bullshit and discern who you should support (if any) and how.

You're on your own here. Learn to rely on yourself.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Total Biscuit's Cancer Is Back.

I have a hell of a lot of respect for Mr. John Bain, better known as "Total Biscuit". His passion for gaming, and his professionalism in covering them in various capacities--including, until now, being a team owner--gave me so much more out of this than anything I could do myself. When his cancer seemed in remission, I was relieved, and I hoped that his follow-up checks would be fine.

They weren't. It's bad. It got in his blood, so it spread, and now it's gotten to an inoperable state. He's terminal now, with 2-3 years expected before death, and with this diagnosis comes a tragedy that I am very familiar with. The medical costs, already far from sensible, are about to go straight to ludicrous. While the announcement of Axiom closing has as much to do with his team's failure to compete in a very strong Korean scene as anything else, there is no doubt that the trigger-pulling had to be influenced by the results from his tests. Mr. Bain is not a wealthy man; he is as common as it gets without descending into low-class degeneracy.

The financial costs will strain his marriage. They will strain his relationship with his son, his parents, his in-laws, and others that are dear to him. The pressure to come for his wife to take the boy, cut John loose, and run for the hills will only increase as this goes on. Mrs. Bain, Gemma, will have her character tested in a crucible most wives don't face outside of war or old age, and I hope only that what little I've seen--what they allowed outsiders like me to see--is truly indicative of who they really are when the shit hits the fan.

But most of all, I am sad for their son. John is just 31 years old. He's young. Gemma's about as young. Their son is but a school boy, and he's in a position where his own father--through no fault that any boy so young can fathom--is going to wither and die before his eyes. I saw such a thing happen to my own father, and I had the benefit of being of age when it happened, and yet I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that nothing is so terrible than to see the once-mighty symbol of what it means to be a man fracture and fail before forces beyond contention. That helplessness is a feeling I wish on no child; it haunts you for the rest of your life, and impacts what you do--and why--thereafter.

Fuck cancer. Mr. Bain, you've done me a great service over the years, and I am glad that you see this situation as not one to hit the Concede button. Make it take you down. Make it kill you. Make it pay for ever day it steals from you. You may yet lose, but if so then make them pay so dearly that it take no more thereafter.

Fuck cancer.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

I'm Going to Make a Game

Sooner or later, every gamer figures that he can make a game of his own. Sometimes they actually succeed.

Well, I'm taking a shot at it. No, not another D&D derivative. Instead, I'm going to make "Wanderer", the fantasy/historical version of the classic science fiction game Traveller. The plan is simple: iterate from start to finish via actual play and feedback thereof. (It worked for Kevin Siembieda, and he's been publishing RPGs for decades.)

My ambitions are small. I want to publish something like Traveller's original three booklets, where the rules are just enough to handle the most common mechanical needs and the rest are guidelines for applying the fundamental principles to situations that come up at the user's table. I may include a supplement for a campaign setting if there is demand for it.

I will begin after the New Year, when the holiday obligations are complete. It'll be just a stripped down Traveller at first, with only low-tech options allowed- no non-humans or supernatural powers for players yet, not until I'm satisfied with the mundane foundation of the game. If I can get a new PC capable of doing so without frying itself, then I'll stream playtest sessions live. (Yes, I would appreciate donations to that end.) Until then, I have manuscripts to get out the door.

And that's it for today.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: D&D Could've Been Very Different

One of the contributors to the Castalia House blog, a man by the name of Jeffro, completed a survey of the works listed in Appendix N of the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. (Link here.) The linked post is time well-spent, especially if you think Tolkien is a big influence on Dungeons & Dragons, but here's a little something to whet your appetite:
  • Tolkien’s ascendancy was not inevitable. It’s really a fluke that he even became the template for the modern fantasy epic. A half dozen authors would have easily been considered on par with Tolkien in the seventies.
  • Our concept of “Tolkienesque” fantasy has little to do with Tolkien’s actual work. Likewise, the “Lovecraftian” stories and games of today have little to do with what Lovecraft actually wrote. Our concepts of swords and sorcery have had the “weird” elements removed from them for the most part. Next to the giants of the thirties, just about everything looks tamed and watered down.
  • Entire genres have been all but eliminated. The majority of the Appendix N list falls under either planetary romance, science fantasy, or weird fiction. Most people’s readings of AD&D and OD&D are done without a familiarity of these genres.
  • Science fiction and fantasy were much more related up through the seventies. Several Appendix N authors did top notch work in both genres. Some did work that could be classified as neither.
  • It used to be normal for science fiction and fantasy fans to read books that were published between 1910 and 1977. There was a sense of canon in the seventies that has since been obliterated.

There's more at the link, and the comments are actually worth reading. Go there, and when you're done read his blog posts on those Appendix N entries. You will be better for doing so, both as a gamer and as a SF/F fan.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Narrative Warfare: It Takes a System

A successful use of Narrative Warfare begins and end with the establishment of a complete system of information control. It begins with information generation, follows through with distribution, and concludes with observing the consequences of the fed information as the targeted population acts on what they're fed. If this sounds familiar to you, that's because it is: it's another application of USAF Colonel John Boyd's OODA Loop paradigm. (That's another reason for why I call this "Narrative Warfare".)

This is more than a simple propaganda campaign. The system works on multiple levels. It begins with creating a choke point in the academic world, where "reliable" or "accepted" information intended to inform institutions originates from. By seizing key positions at key academic bodies, and then forming cadres from the students that come through the courses taught therein, you create a network of fellow travelers that carries forth into the rest of the targeted population.

These networks focus their first few waves focus on entryism; they get their most ordinary members into targeted groups and organizations, build up some credibility therein, and then use it to bring more fellows into the group/organization until they reach critical mass and begin to purge resistance to their control from it. Once done, they re-purpose it as an organ for their agenda.

If this seems like a cancer, that's because it is: a memetic cancer.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Blog Recommendation: Forgotten Weapons

Firearms. I love them, especially the old and the quirky. While you can find plenty of channels at YouTube, and plenty of blogs, talking about the latest and greatest as well as iconic classics there are very few like Forgotten Weapons. These are guys after my heart, talking about prototypes that went nowhere, firearms now disdained or neglected despite past prominence or importance, and so on. (They also have a YouTube channel and a Full30 channel.)

You need not be a shooter, or even someone who likes guns, to appreciate this blog and its video channels. You do need some appreciation for the history of firearms, and how technological development works in practice, to get the full benefit because being able to situate specific weapons and their individual stories within the larger context of Man's history. Like it or not, the history of weaponry and warfare is a central pillar to the history of Mankind, and being able to study past developments and deduce the patterns that repeat in these episodes will make you better able to make useful decisions in making the future that you want to see.

On a related note...

I have a certain affection for the SKS, and I do wish--despite the dominance of the AR-15--that a rifle much like it (traditional stock design, fixed internal magazine fed by stripper clip, but Garand-style sights; skip the bayonet) existed, but chambered for the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge instead. That sort of desire, until now, was not commercially viable; with the rise of manufacturing technologies that decentralize design and production, it will become viable soon- along with other firearms I want, but do not exist.

And this sort of thing is what counts as a Lazy Sunday post for me.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Narrative Warfare: It's Imperfect at Best

Let's talk Cognitive Difference.

If you own any significant property--a car, a house, a gun, a motorcycle, a power saw, etc.--then you comprehend that such things require regular maintenance and upkeep, even if it's just periodic preventive work to keep the thing operating as intended. It's part of the cost of ownership, and the responsible grumble but do it anyway. Social systems also require such regular upkeep, even when they operate within the bounds of Natural Law.

Cognitive Difference arises when the Narrative deviates from Reality.

There is a flaw in Narrative Warfare, and it is in its deviation from Reality--from the Law of Nature--and the natural processes that operate universally whether we like them or not. The Narrative can be a very compelling story, a potent and alluring mythology, but it is still just an illusion. The Narrative has no substance, and therefore cannot contradict Nature and Nature's Law. The most the Narrative can do is to gaslight the people into a delusion that somehow circumvents the reason of the people.

When what you're told produces Cognitive Difference, HEED THAT WARNING!

If you want to find a foothold to defeat Narrative Warfare, this is it. If you want to help someone else get out, there is your cornerstone to build your effort upon. Through the discipline of the Trivium Method, you can recognize these differences and defeat them, thereby improving your mental health and making further resistance to this information-based mind control possible. It's applied psychology, folks. Nothing more.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Narrative Warfare: The Obliteration of History

I have seen the videos and read the reports of the Muslim fanatics deliberately obliterating the archaeological remnants of Mankind's history. I am appalled. This is no less a willful attempt to rewrite the past to suit the interests of present power players than burning books, torching the Library of Alexandria, or other destruction of archives and other evidences inconvenient to someone seeking or holding power. This, contrary to the diseased minds of Social Justice cultists, is the true erasure: the erasure of the truth of what went before, the evidence that runs contrary to whatever Narrative Warfare campaign some party wants to achieve.

Destruction of history is a means of Narrative Warfare.

I hate being lied to, especially on matters of fundamental importance, and as military history got me into history as a field the search for truth is what keeps me here and has me looking for trouble. There are two ways to destroy history. The first is literal, to destroy archives and other evidence that verifies what we know of the past. The second is metaphorical, and that is to falsify the records so that the information within is only the information that a Narrative Warlord wants its targeted people to know.

The adulteration of historical records is Narrative Warfare.

The reason is because some motherfucker read 1984 as an instruction manual and decided that editing the past for the benefit of his present (and hopeful future) was a good idea. So, if what you know gets edited on the sly--deniably--then what you're able to act upon gets constrained to a range of possibilities that the editing party can predict and control. This is the meta-level application of Herman & Chomsky's analysis of the Western (particularly American) mainstream media in Manufacturing Consent, and how it does just that.

Your would-be masters need your consent, and fraud is on the table.

They are quite happy to scam you, at the highest level possible, into getting you to go along with their plans to treat you like cattle: to be herded and exploited, and then culled when no more of use to them. Whomever the would-be masters are, they are universal in their contempt for life and it shows when their mask slips (as it does with Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissenger). So, why do you think they would not lie--big or small, whole or part--to trick you? Just as some of these people bury, hide, burn, or blow up evidence inconvenient to them others will block access, edit raw footage, use special effects trickery, and other tools of the trade to feed you false information--to lie to you--and get you to act on ideas that are not your own.

The villains blowing up relics are not the worst of the lot.

Remember, Narrative Warfare is a fight over information. Blowing up relics counts, but lying--even slightly--about those doing is also counts and it is far more subtle as well as insidious when media players, large and small, do the same thing. News media has no legal obligation to tell the truth, as a sworn witness giving testimony does, yet that is exactly what we are meant to do rely on them to do. Stop believing what you see and hear from sources you have not vetted until you do so.

The duty to preserve the truth is on all of us, lest our posterity know only lies.

Because that is what the obliteration of history causes: a void, filled by lies, committing fraud upon the people by would-be elites seeking power over others via information control. The fanatics and ideologues erase evidence contrary to their ideology, be they Muslim fanatics in the Middle-East or Globalists of the Anglo-American Establishment, for the same end. You deserve better, but you have to do your own thinking to get it, so stop letting these thieves steal what is rightfully yours. Protect Man's history!

Thursday, October 8, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: A Raider is Me

I rejoined my guild's raid team. Did a fresh clear of Hellfire Citadel on Normal. We do two nights a week, and we're small (prior to the addition of Flex in Mists of Pandaria we were a strict 10-man guild by necessity), so don't expect Method or any other top-end Mythic guild's level of progression, but my guild's been around and active since the final patch of Vanilla (and raiding since The Burning Crusade) so mine is a guild that's known as being Old Timers on my realm. We aren't going to get those Mythic kills, but that's more due to a lack of interest than any other factor; we have skills and good practices, so clearing 75% of the bosses in five hours, wiping only on the newer bosses, is pretty good. At the rate I'm going, my main character will have the Legendary Ring in a week or so.

I hadn't raided since December of last year. I kept my sub up, and I played, but I didn't raid to focus on the manuscript instead. Well, with that done, it was only a matter of time before I rejoined the team. My main is a Fury Warrior, so I'm in the melee scrum standing opposite the tanks on boss fights hitting said boss with a pair of two-handed weapons as hard and as often as I can. Sometimes I tank, so I keep up the off-spec gearset and practice now and again just in case. (Had to do that a few times late in Pandaria during The Siege of Ogrimmar on the Shamans fight; my guild did the three tank strategy, so I went with one of the main tanks into Garrosh' room with one of the bosses.)

Raiding is the big focus for World of Warcraft, and it has been since the get-go. It's where the most time, assets, and talent goes in this game- a fact never more obvious than with Warlords of Draenor. At the smaller raid size my guild runs with (10-13), you still get a social experience more than a bureaucratic exercise in work, which I prefer. I've raided with the core of the team for about a decade now, and the others have been with us for a few years now. Even with me taking most of a year as a break, rejoining was like slipping back into a custom-made costume to find it still fitting like a glove. I had a good time, got good loot, made good progression, and came away satisfied that shit got done- a sense of satisfaction I do not get out of anything else.

Which is why, despite all of the problems World of Warcraft has, and why I find alternatives trying so hard to find other things in the genre to deliver that satisfaction, few succeed and fewer still succeed over time. (Final Fantasy XIV does, but its raid game isn't quite what WOW offers just yet, but the other means more than make up for that.) There is nothing like the satisfaction of crashing into an enemy's stronghold, slaughtering the enemy's minions, ganking his henchmen one by one, and then taking on the mastermind in mortal combat before looting the place--and his corpse--for the treasures that made his power and taking it all for ourselves.


FOR THE HORDE!

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

DING!

Leveled up today. There will be pizza and root beer.

I'm going to have a book out by the end of the year. I'm just dealing with details now, instead of not having something to publish. It's genre fiction, and the first novel I've ever published, so I have realistic expectations of its stand-alone performance. I'm not Mike Cernovich, but I think I can hit initial sales equal to a typical Big Five new author on my own, which are one tenth Cernovich's results for Gorilla Mindset (which will hit 10K sales by the time I publish).

This means I'm going to start on another book soon, also fiction--genre fiction--and hoping to finish and publish it before next Summer. The goal now is to establish and maintain a publishing pace of two books a year. This blog will factor into the system; expect me to talk about what I'm doing and provide samples as I progress through a manuscript. Yes, my posts on Narrative Warfare do factor into things, and I will add non-fiction to the project list.

And that's all I have to say today. Time for said pizza and root beer.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

About to Ding in Real Life

My birthday is tomorrow. I'm always feeling a bit giddy at this point in the year. Well into adulthood, I still look forward to my birthday as I did when I was a child. It's the day I reserve for me, without guilt or fear. So, today I won't be writing about things of dire importance; it can't rain all the time, so today I'm lightening up a bit and indulging in a bit of childish whim. If you need your daily dose of dire, you may want to skip today's post.

Monday, October 5, 2015

Narrative Warfare: An Example

Narrative Warfare can be further summarized as bad science: you start with your conclusion, gather elements that you call evidence to support it (if you bother to try at all), smother it in emotionally-manipulative language (rhetoric) to smooth over the rough spots and shut down naysayers, and keep at it until your bullshit is accepted as fact and folks begin acting on it en masse. What is actually true--what the facts are, how they are, how they interact, etc.--matters only if it advances the Narrative; otherwise, it is denied or decried until shut out of the perception of the audience you're targeting.

Let's take a simple example, encapsulated in this quote:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Let us make one verifiable claim: the late Saddam Hussein, formerly the despot rule of Iraq, had sweet fuck-all to do with 9/11. Yet said event led to the U.S. leading an invasion of that country in revenge for it. Subsequently, it lead to Saddam's capture, trial, conviction, and execution.

That is Narrative Warfare in action.

The American Establishment, the oligarchy (extant in both major parties) that rules the United States and dominates the institutions in and around the Federal Government, wanted Iraq put down and Saddam removed. 9/11 was the pretext used to launch such overt operations against the former U.S. client regime, despite neither the despot nor the regime being involved, and the very process that Goering explained happened to gain domestic and foreign political cover to do it.

I say that this is a simple example. There are two big reasons for saying so: it is an example executed at a tactical level of time to achieve a tactical geopolitical objective, not something at the strategic level, and its methods are crude by today's standards of what Narrative Warfare is able to do- and was thought so then, almost 15 years ago. However, for those of you not accustomed to such matters such a simple example better illustrates what the system is and how it works.

Narrative Warfare is based on well-told lies, not well-made lies.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

My Life as a Gamer: Me and RPGs

To quote Monty Python, "And now for something completely different."

I have a life-long love affair with Role-Playing Games, especially the original form of the genre: Tabletop Role-Playing.

Dungeons & Dragons transformed things in ways most don't expect.


May of 1974 is just a few months before my own birth, so much like getting your infant a puppy D&D and I have been linked since birth. I just wasn't aware of it until I got into elementary school, when I was introduced to it on October 9th of 1981. Like every other punk kid, I sucked harder than Hoover on overdrive. I rolled an Elf, who died on the first level. I rolled a Dwarf, who died on the first level. (Both to dragons, because the DM was a slightly-older punk kid being a shit, as we all were then.) Then I rolled a Fighter, who went on to survive and thrive; he's still alive today, though I haven't played him in years. (Retirement's been good to him.)

I'd since go on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (both 1st and 2nd Edition), then Dungeons & Dragons (the third edition, in both of its iterations). Today, if I play a current edition, I stick with the fork--Pathfinder--over the 4th and 5th Edition of the official game. But I now prefer to play the editions I knew as a child, thanks to meeting and talking with those who were adults back then playing the game as well as meeting those who had a hand in creating it- a trend now resulting in historical works such as Jon Peterson's Playing at the World.

But not all RPGs are Dungeons & Dragons, and I like a lot of not-D&Ds out there.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Defense Against the Narrative: The Trivium Method

I said yesterday that there is a way out from under someone using Narrative Warfare, and that it is a discipline that must be developed and maintained much as one would any other perishable skill or body of knowledge.

The defense against the Narrative is the Trivium Method


I first heard about this recent restoration of the Classical Trivium from the Tragedy and Hope community, specifically the Peace Revolution podcast, some years ago when I began investigation into what would become the general theme of my graduate studies. Being that the originators of said podcast want this spread far and wide, some of them put together a curated online site to get folks going: Trivium Education.

Friday, October 2, 2015

How Narrative Warfare Works (Summarized)

There is one thing that confidence artists, military strategists, intelligence professionals, film and television professionals, advertisers and marketers, and press secretaries all agree upon: the prime and vital importance to control the flow of information. Every one of these pursuits relies on the ability to manipulate their targets by using information to push the target to go where they want them to go and do what they want them to do when and how they want it done.

Information is the basis for freedom.


There are multiple levels at which information control can, and does, operate. When we talk of Narrative Warfare, we're looking at the big picture, the level of strategic goals and the logistical systems required to make them happem. We're talking about objectives that are years, decades, even generations away from completion. That means we're talking about operations whose effects are slow, subtle, and outside the observable scope of a common man's perceptions.

Narrative Warfare is about grooming the target.


It's gas-lighting on a grand scale, a mass-grooming (the way pedophiles groom victims) meant to warp a target's sense of reality, and get them to accept something that is not acceptable in the real world. It's the deliberate undermining of a people's morality, followed by the insertion of a fraudulent alternative--a malignant fantasy--whose manipulative effects take a while to become clearly manifest.

Narrative Warfare is a cult mind control technique. It's a human rights violation.


I'm not out of line to call it a mind control technique. You can't act on what you don't know. Controlling what you know controls what you think, and therefore what you act upon. That is literal mind control. The converse--that you can act on what you know--applies even when what you know is wrong, especially if its a lie. False knowledge is still actionable, as all that changes are the possible results. Therefore, if what you know is a mixture of false information and the omission of truth--if what you know is a fantasy--then someone's controlling you for their benefit; you are NOT your own man.

Narrative Warfare is this done to deliberately achieve control over others. That means you and yours.


The objective is to achieve and maintain control over a population without overt violence on the part of the would-be oligarchs or tyrant, and the use of Narrative Warfare is the system employed to do so. There is a way out from under, but it is as much a discipline as its imposition is a system, and I'll talk more about that in a later post. For now, I leave with this quote:

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” - Commisoner Praval Lal, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Narrative Warfare: An Introduction

If you spend any time around Social Justice cultists, corrupt journalists, political operatives, or others working in some form of Public Relations then you have been exposed to "The Narrative" and--I hope--noticed how it often conflicts with the verifiable facts of reality.

"The Narrative" is weaponized mythology.


A myth, as Joseph Campbell once explained, is a story. Specifically, it is a story that a people tells to itself to explain something about how the people relates to the world. A body of such stories bundled together is a mythology. The effect of a mythology is to bring order to the minds of the people, simplifying a complex world into something easily comprehended and acted upon, much as adults do for young children.

To weaponize something is to take up a thing and employ it as a deliberate tool intended to do damage to those subject to its effects. Tree limbs wielded as clubs, rocks used as sling stones, language used to incite others to violence, diseases modified to maximize effects upon subjects, power sources used to project flame or explode on command, and so on.

Weaponized mythology is mythology as propaganda.


"The Narrative" is the mythology promulgated for the purpose of providing cover--cultural, social, and political--for those seeking to take and hold power. It's method of operation is that of a parasite; it is a parasitic memology, and those affected become subjects of a hive mind. It demands adherence to group-think, loyalty to itself above all things, and feeds upon the anxieties and insecurities of those that it infests via the classic cult techniques of isolation, conformity, indoctrination via repetition, and trauma. It acts in the psychology of a rabbit warren, even if it presents itself as something other than that.

"The Narrative" is the tool of a mind-control death cult.


"The Narrative", ultimately, is a lie. It is the use of rhetoric, in the form of mythology (itself masquerading as something legitimate, such as academic discourse), intended to commit fraud upon a people for the end of seizing power and keeping it indefinitely. The sooner that a people see this for what it is, the sooner that they begin to resist it- and ultimately destroy it. To use "The Narrative" is to wage war.

This is how Narrative Warfare begins.