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"Narrative Maintainer" is kind of a slippery term. It's not that it isn't accurate or doesn't happen - it happens all the time and many people seem to devote their careers to it. But so long as it can be perceived as helping or hurting 'one side' of a public controversy, no matter what someone said, or what they thought, or what their intentions really were, you can always accuse them of having said it for "narrative maintenance" purposes, and there's no good way for them to defend themselves from the charge.

“It wasn’t an insurrection. It was only an idiotic farce. Noted."

Someone can think that the 1/6 mob events were ridiculous and really bad for a variety of reasons while abstaining from the use of the manipulative and bogus vocabulary of one set of actual "narrative maintainers", which poses its own dangers.

You can imagine a wide spectrum of possible interpretations of the events of that day, but without getting into semantic arguments, my personal threshold for what would constitute a fair and reasonable use of the word 'insurrection' by American right-wing elements is just not compatible with events that do not involve a *truly incredible* amount of gunfire.

If on 1/5/21 you had said "actual insurrection attempt by the right tomorrow" to basically anybody, streets covered in piles of spent cartridges would have been the least gory of the many extremely vivid images that immediately popped into every sane person's head, as a manifestation of mere common sense, especially one conditioned by Hollywood / media for generations.

Maybe I missed it, but to my knowledge, no rioter fired even a single shot, which for a crowd that large in DC would be a relief even if it were just a music festival. For comparison and perspective: lately, on average, there are about 50 shots fired every day in DC, most not by law enforcement.

The fact that no one is being charged with actual 'insurrection' also weighs against using the word just because the "narrative maintenance" folks would like everyone to keep repeating it. It would be like describing the Navy Yard shooting from seven years prior as a 'Civil War' as it involved infinitely (in the divide-by-zero sense) more shooting and murdered people, though there was just one perpetrator - Aaron Alexis.

At any rate, one thing libertarians are usually very good at is having accurate insights and presumptions and a keen spider sense for when some event is about to get blown completely out of proportion by the powers that be for propaganda purposes in order to legitimate yet another obnoxious, liberty-eroding, constitutional-right-circumventing, and irreversible power grab by the state. They usually try to get people to slow down, think, understand what's really going on, consider costs vs benefits, put things in perspective by laying out objective measurements of actual harm and damage, and so forth. It is the libertarian version of "Standing athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'"

The way 1/6 is actually being used now, which is as justification for turning the domestic security apparatus against the enemies of the state (i.e., enemies of the movement which controls the state), provides another reason to lean in favor of the "not actually a big deal in the scheme of things" interpretation.

I happen to believe that interpretation, but now watch me get accused of just trying to maintain a different narrative.

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Arnold, I think you are not drawing some necessary distinctions on January 6. A relative handful of disorderly persons, egged on by undercover federal agents in some cases, entered the Capitol. There were on the other hand perhaps as many as 500,000 who were in DC to peacefully protest, which is their right. To treat them all as the same, so as to discredit those with legitimate concerns about the integrity of the election, is not up to your usual standards. Also, you seem to default to the position that the election must have been valid, though there is plenty of evidence of fraud in critical places. I think a better position is to treat that question as unresolved.

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I read a few posts in Arnade's substack. They're really good. Thanks for finding them. He seems to have a pretty good grip on what's going on in "real" America vs. the America of the woke.

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Please Arnold, take a break of your regular program of intellectual fantasies and go back to reality. I still remember your Covid strategy so please read this new post by Berenson

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/if-you-are-a-vaccine-company-executive/comments

and the related interview to Pfizer CEO. You may want to review your strategy. Maybe Berenson has failed to understand what the CEO said and the implications for both our health and his company but I'd like very much to hear your opinion.

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I would be interested in thoughts on the circumstantial but quite powerful (in my opinion) evidence that Fed agents (or at least people who are being protected by the Fed) instigated the Jan 6 Capitol break in. I haven’t heard many substantial mainstream or center-right takes on this story, although if true it completely changes the interpretation of the event. Are people just waiting for more info before expressing an opinion?

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Arnade's writing is a plainly stated window into a world that almost no elites work in, visit, live, and that few are from. Even with my own history he is worth reading and thinking about. After spending my entire childhood and into adulthood in the Midwest I've now lived in a Southern county for over half a decade. A county where the largest city has over 100K people and there isn't a black or white area. And yet also during this time have heard the N word said out loud half the total times in my life.

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Sorry, Arnold. Your latest post proves that your strategy of relying on comments to specific issues as presented by your FITs is not appropriate to address those issues. Neither your FITs' opinions nor yours are well presented: the issues are not well defined and the arguments are incomplete and vague. I regret you present the "voting rights" issue as if it had been defined by the false D-claim of a riot on January 6, 2020, and the "U.S. government strategy to deal with the pandemic in 2022" issue as if it were only a problem of obesity and the need for a diet. Although I regret you refer to Goldberg for any issue, I appreciate Taibbi and Emily Oster’s opinions on the issues they address. I don’t have time to go through the other issues and authors you refer in your post.

I hope you write about the two specific issues I just mentioned. It’s quite obvious that the barbarians have to rely on a large change in “voting rights” to consolidate the power they grabbed last November. It is a U.S. constitutional issue, like it or not, because the current system is based on the states’ authority to set their own voting rights. You claim to be concerned about regulatory reform but the sort of reform the U.S. will have depends on the people elected to represent the states in D.C. and the person elected to be president.

Also, today it’s obvious that the big failure of the past 12 months to address the pandemic is a direct result of the obfuscation caused by the barbarians’ strategy to grab power in 2020. Yesterday’s events prove it. More importantly, anybody who has read Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions” knows that “the science” will be late to take today’s decisions, sometimes too late as it has been the case for the past two years with the pandemic. What has happened since late November 2021 with omicron has made clear how little science has advanced in understanding the virus, the disease, and the vaccines. Today your country’s failure is defined not by what your senile President did in the past 12 months but by his personal failure to understand the trade-offs involved in developing a strategy for the months up to November 2022.

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Moxie Marlinspike is a very sharp dude.

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My view is that, on balance, it's kind of unfortunate coincidental* timing that "Web3" tech came into prominence at a time of monetary expansion for the dollar and when there is a lot of concern about high inflation.

My impression is that historically these kinds of expansions are correlated with a lot of frenzied enthusiasm, fervor, and excessive animal spirits in various asset markets, like the tulip-mania phase of a Minsky cycle, but spilling over especially into purportedly non-replicable classes like real estate, 'art', antiques, collectibles, etc.

Of all the smart, clever, promising ideas I've read about how this new tech might enable new possibilities of big-picture meaningful improvements, it's kind of tragi-comic that the bulk of the energy seems to be going into things like NFT madness which often doesn't make any sense and even more often strikes one as foolish and sketchy as hell. Hopefully if (when?) all the weird stuff crashes hard, it won't take the high potential of the other Web3 ideas down with it.

*Maybe not a coincidence, I'm not sure. Some of the expansion probably contributed to Bitcoin rocketing up, which is turn made a lot of people rich and got a lot of other people very interested in the tech. Maybe we'll laugh one day when in the final analysis it turns out that all the effort at stimulus ended up stimulating alternatives to the stimulator.

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"anti-vaxxers and people who merely have anti-mandate or anti-passport attitudes? It’s all the same obstructionism to them." Of course there are differences, but they share the same blind spot: vaccines protect other people, not just the person vaccinated.

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"the “stop the steal” movement was not made particularly worse by the events of January 6th." But the 1/6 events were certainly made worse by "the stop the steal" lie.

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