Sunday reflections on the FM website project, perhaps an inspiration for you!

Summary: Sunday is a day for contemplation. Today let’s look at the FM website. What’s the point of the project? What’s the cost? Why is worth doing? Some of these answers might help or even inspire you to action.

Contents

The FM website project
Today’s view of the future: pain will teach us
Why run the FM Website?
For More Information
Pogo tells us the sad truth

(1) The FM website project

The FM website recently hit 2.5 million pageviews, 2,60o posts, and 31 thousand comments since opening six years ago in November 2007. This month it will welcome its 3 millionth visitor. It’s an immense project to produce aprox 7 million words in posts and responses to comments, with the detail and supporting links that are SOP here. It’s taken roughly ten thousand hours of my time. Plus the time and effort of the other authors.

The subject of the FM website is geo-politics, broadly defined. The tag word cloud (lower right menu bar) shows the wide range of topics covered by those three words. But it began in 2003 as I looked at our wars. Our government’s reports looked false. Such as the assertion there were no insurgents in Iraq. General Petraeus said they were bandits. Rumsfled said they were “dead-enders”. Most of the American people, including our geopolitical experts, believed this nonsense. I, and many others, began to provide alternative perspectives from which to see more clearly.

I wondered what caused this situation? That led to seeing the oddities in US foreign policy. And then to seeing the oddities in other US government policies (especially economics and climate change), and then to seeing the oddities in US politics. This slowly led to the big picture: the Second Republic (founded by the Constitution) was dying, and a New America being built on its ruins. Eventually I found the cause by looking in the mirror: the problem is us.

The 31 thousand comments provided another perspective on this problem, as so many showed the intensity of the grip Americans have on their indoctrination (many were also brilliant and informative, from which I learned much — and led to entries on the Smackdown page).

From that point (December 2009) my goal shifted from analysis to advocacy — to convince others of this. Becoming soldiers in the war for American’s future. I knew from the start this would be difficult, as the project to build a New America relies on our our passive acceptance of false narratives about many things, which together create an unclear vision of the world. It also relies on our disengagement from our responsibility to defend the Republic.

These six years of work have brought forth a remarkably accurate series of predictions (resulting from a judicious choice of experts to rely upon) — mostly of bad news.

(2) Today’s view of the future: pain will teach us

My new guess (I consider them “predictions” only when founded on expert’s analysis): nothing will change this evolution except a collision with reality. Then we will have a moment of truth, when events force us to decide what kind of people we will be. This is a form of the “doomsterism” I have so often disagreed with. I believe the evidence has now become overwhelming — such as our recent supine reactions to the news about government surveillance and rising inequality.

This guess rests on my personal experiences, my direct observations of the America around me, my reading about the overall state of the nation, and my thousands of conversations in comments and by email with readers of the FM website.

(3) Why run the FM Website?

Whatever the odds of success, it is our obligation as citizens to do what we can to preserve the Republic, as previous generations have done (often at great personal cost).

I have done what I can in my community, devoting countless hours and funds — both more than I could afford. All for naught (see the details in An Independence Day special report: I have seen the New America!) Here I try something different, as the only path I see open to me.

I appreciate your support for this project. By reading. By posting comments. By recommending us to your friends. And, of course, by making donations. I greatly appreciate your support.

The future holds many wonders. Let’s work together to make the best of it.

Donate button — The tip jar is on the right-side menu

(4) For More Information about the FM website

About the FM website
Predictions revisited – how do they look now?
Smackdowns – corrections & rebuttals to FM posts
Politics of the FM site: radical leftist reformer or right-wing iconoclast?
Re-envisioning the FM website, becoming soldiers in the war for American’s future, 21 December 2009
Lessons learned during 2012 from comments on the FM website, 30 December 2012
What can we learn from visits to the FM website from interesting Internet communities, 31 December 2012
Why comments have been turned off on the FM website. It’s the same reason others have done so., 13 January 2013
A look at the record hits, and what they tell us about ourselves, 28 September 2013
Confession about a failed forecast, 26 May 2013
Looking at the FM website: are we helping to reform America?, 6 November 2013

(5) Pogo tells us the sad truth

This is true about much more than our treatment of the environment:
.

The enemy is us — From a 1970 poster made for the first Earth Day by Walt Kelly.

Thomas More

9 December 2013 at 9:56 pm

Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish…plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts. (..)

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. — George Orwell, “In Front Of Your Nose.”

3 thoughts on “Sunday reflections on the FM website project, perhaps an inspiration for you!”

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Thomas More
9 December 2013 at 9:56 pm

Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices flourish…plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in another part of their mind are aware to those facts. (..)

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say ‘Guns before butter’, while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. — George Orwell, “In Front Of Your Nose.”

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1. Fabius Maximus
  9 December 2013 at 10:10 pm
  
  Thomas,
  
  I agree on all points. It is, however, magnitudes and relative levels that seem most important.
  
  Are we more disconnected now from reality — i.e., poorer vision — than in the past? Than vs other nations today and in the past?
  
  I can show extreme evidence from today, but how does one make relative comparisons? I avoid this by discussing the level vs. what I believe we need to have in order for the Republic to survive.
  
  It’s unfortunately — as so often with big issues — too-soft data.
  
  For comparison — compare us now vs Russians circa 1960s and 1970s. How much did they know about their condition vs the West? What little I’ve seen suggested that most did not believe the propaganda, but did not know the size of the gap. As seen in the reactions of immigrants after the Fall — their astonishment at seeing supermarkets.
  
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