Fear not, this isn’t self-flagellation in the hope of evoking praise. It’s just that I continue to think the future of The Resistance is not lone bloggers making the same points over and over again: if it is to be anything, it will be firm affiliations of objective fact-hounds who between them can provide a portal for open minds with practical solutions….not closed ranks of backward-looking ideologists.
Far too many people today talk up the influence of the internet in general and digital commentators in particular. But just as with any medium, the factors favouring success revolve around these four simple elements: money, power, fame and content quality. It is a long, long haul making that last (indefinable) thing available to a wider audience.
Over the last few weeks, I have been collecting all the available hit-stimulation formats and techniques I could find. I’m not impressed: most of them are designed to sell more product, and the targeting claims are fanciful to say the least. Equally, far too many of them are full of commenters giving mixed signals about their species: some sound like extra-terrestrials, others like members of lost tribes who somehow escaped only to be adopted by inbred Sicilians, others still as if they might be enthusiasts for a new phonetic Esperanto. It is pretty desperado.
To try and give some scale to Lone Star problem, I list below for you goals I failed to achieve in 2016:
- Evoke a sense of guilt among Treasury and DWP ministers and civil servants about their lies, disinformation, contract-breaking and dishonourably incompetent attitude on the issues of Waspi pensions and disabled support funds.
- Manage to persuade the now umpteen strains of Waspi members to unite and stand firm for complete reinstitution of what they were promised 60+ years ago.
- Get Waspis to grasp that only physical resistance will budge the now Maypole version of heartless and crooked neocon governance.
- Persuade elements in the UK LibLeft/SNP axis to cooperate in expelling a greater evil from government.
- Engage with activist members of that axis without being the recipient of hate tweets and profoundly offensive emails.
- Persuade a single Remainer that not everyone who voted for Brexit is racist, old, Little Englander, uneducated, Bad, fascist, insane, incompetent or irresponsible.
- Dislodge the LeftLibCamerlot narrative that lied about the after-effects of Brexit and is still working hard to undermine it.
- Convince UK Smuggies that their ignorance about the real nature of Greek culture and Greek “debt”is risible.
- Wake people up to the real danger of Newscorp resurgence. Wake them up when the resurgence happened.
- Increase awareness of the Italian basket-case. Raise any interest in the subject, stage by stage, as Monte dei Paschi collapsed in all but name, Renzi lost his referendum, Berlin went lalalah about bank bailouts there, and all the private bailers-out ran for the hills.
- Get anyone beyond an already converted niche to face the reality that a thing called EUNATO (Yoo-nate-oh) runs Europe, and is an increasingly inseparable organisation under the control of Pentagon hawks, the CIA and Federica Mogherini.
- Stop idiots from underestimating Trump and dismissing him as some kind of freak chimp. Suggest the Progressives might be wrong as, one by one, his chances of winning primaries, getting the nomination and then winning the Election were dismissed as “way off”.
- Suggest with any degree of credibility that – despite his obvious gauche, macho and narcissistic tendencies – President-elect Trump is the only President since Carter who stands any chance of breaking up the Establishment cartel in US fiscal, economic and foreign policy.
- Convert anyone beyond a very few to the reality that every single major bourse in the World bears no relation whatsoever to economic reality on the ground, and is wildly overbought….to the tune of an average 40% at least.
- Convince anyone beyond one or two reasonable Brits that (a) Putin is 50 times smarter than anyone in EUNATO, (b) we should stop poking sticks into his nest (c) he had the best strategy in Syria (d) he did not shoot down the MH17.
- Argue effectively among those in the Corbynista Tendency that Jeremy is decent but unelectable, and the maths are there for anyone to check.
- Persuade visually challenged LeftLibs and self-appointed expert Gary Lineker that the Calais camp was a nightmare of African criminality in which there were almost no women or children…children defined as under 12, ie, not teenagers.
- Latterly, to lift anyone’s mind off the sofa of thought and into examination of the murder cover-up involving NATO terrorist funding Chief Yves Chandelon.
Here and there I’ve had one or two little wins.
I think there’s now a growing body of opinion among the bright 1% that Viktor Orban is not the Devil’s Spawn George Soros and the CIA would have us all believe.
I think some were persuaded early on that the second wave of EU migrants were exactly that, and not refugees from anywhere….particularly Syria.
For some reason, my pieces about Jeremy Hunt’s reliance on crony and family legs-up to achieve his current overpromoted status went viral in 2016.
And I’m pleased that the majority of Waspis now reject Ros Altmann as an empty vessel.
That’s it.
There are all kinds of simple reasons for this outcome, and they’re clearly interconnected:
- I don’t have the money to buy more visibility and links
- Anyone on Earth today with access to a pc or android is overloaded with far more information, opinions and interpretations than any single human could possibly digest
- Counterfeit analyses and fake reporting of events complicate that sheer volume of data to a point at which it becomes indecipherable
- Most Western education systems are programmed to produce acceptors rather than sceptics. The Establishment in all its myriad forms thus has a built-in advantage before any persuasion starts
- Cultural tribalism, ideology and religion act against any and all contrarian ideas offering fresh insights
- ‘Not invented here’ is as prevalent as it’s always been
- I’m getting older, and only post at a third of the level I was achieving three years ago
Look at the stats. The Slog is, in terms of fairly to very regular readership, evenly gender based, upmarket and heavily biased over 45. A few weeks ago it topped 20 million views alltime during the seven years it’s been in existence. In turn, 3.3 million separate visitors have been here.
But daily unique visitors are rarely above 2,400, and daily hits in total average between 4,000 and 8,000.
On my own, you might say I am the equivalent of Theresa May’s small force of squaddies on the Polish border, standing ready to repel to beastly Russian hordes.
I have a sense these days that blogging per se has had its nadir, and is now quietly fading away. I think there may well be better ways to reach the audience; but even in those cases, one larger ‘Objective Information’ brand is going to have a far bigger impact than individuals.
This media argument is really the same one I apply to social and economic politics these days: if we want to push the real Nazis back, landing craft, battleships and air cover will all be required to gain a foothold on their land mass.
But sadly, this too is an obvious reality I and many others have failed to make persuasive; if minds are more tightly closed than a clam (with a brain in there to match) then victory over the Darkness is impossible.
Last night at The Slog: Not the 9 o’clock News, starring Hillary Peron and some public executions
The Slog 