Jan 252021
 
 January 25, 2021  Posted by at 4:14 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Ary Scheffer Faust in his Study c1840

 

 

The essence of the story of Faust is simple: He is a man who sells his -future- soul to the devil in return for short term gain, for riches “now”. But years later, the devil comes to collect his prize.

Here’s a modern allegory.

 

In 2015 -or thereabouts- many of the mainstream media (MSM) outlets were facing dire times. Social media were taking over much of their readers’ attention, their ad revenue plummeted, and they didn’t have big stories to tell that would revert that trend. Things did not look good for the survival of CNN, New York Times or MSNBC. The Washington Post suffered the same problems, but they were owned by the world’s richest man.

And then the salvation presented itself on their doorstep in the form of Donald Trump. It’s not something they planned for, it just happened; it even took them a while to figure it out, but once they did, they went for it headfirst and all-in. How could they not? They were dying. Their finance departments told them anything negative about Trump was selling like hotcakes. And Trump willingly added to the fire.

The MSM made a Faustian pact with the devil (through his messenger Mephistopheles) for survival. And that devil was not Donald Trump, they never signed a deal with him, the devil disguised himself in the shape of clickbait, which very much has the devil’s signature, since it required them to do their “reporting” based on promoting hatred, conflict, division, anger, negativity, bitterness, resentment. All of which sells. Like nothing else. You don’t get people’s attention with happy stories, you get it by making them angry.

 

Not that the devil didn’t appreciate, and promote, the fact that they presented Trump as him, mind you. Indeed, disguise is the best trick of all, because it makes people fail to recognize him. But yes, you have to wonder when the devil will come for his payment, when he will come for their souls, as he comes for Dr. Faust’s in the original story. Because they’ve sold them alright, they traded their future souls for riches in the present.

Not that anyone would ever acknowledge that while they do. Faust is just a metaphor, an allegory, after all. But even if they don’t, we still can. And they’re not going to stop doing it. They will come after Trump with all they can think of, because for now, he’s still their meal ticket.

So there will be much attention for the next impeachment attempt, which may be the first one that tries to impeach someone who’s already left office, and they’ll bleed it for all they got, aided and abetted by the Democratic party. There will be a ton of lawsuits as well, Trump will be dragged from courtroom to courtroom. They all smell blood in the water. They want him humiliated, they want him bankrupt. And above all, they desperately want clickbait.

They’ll go after all other Republicans they can as well, and the ones who once supported Trump are easy pickings. They won’t stop until there’s no GOP left. Yeah, yeah, the spoils of war and all that. There’s something to say for leaving a system intact that at least appears to allow room for more than one point of view, but, you know, feeding frenzy.

The Dems, while clamoring for diversity, intend to leave only those people standing who agree with their ideas, so in reality that diversity only refers to skin color, gender, sexual orientation. Not to what you think. Y’all have to think what they do, or else. Not that they themselves all think the same, mind you, there’s miles between Biden and AOC, Hillary and Kamala, but you’ll be told about that later. First, the division.

Praising Biden will work for a little while, but only as long as you can compare him favorably to Trump. Once Trump exists stage left, there will be an enormous void that none of the parties involved, the Dems, the media, US intelligence, know how to fill. And that’s where things will get dangerous. What will they feed their clickbait hunger with? War? Russia, China, Syria, Iran?

 

The easy part: the media can lock themselves up in their echo chambers, provided they tempt enough people to go with them. Clickbait made sure they did. The hard part: they lost half their potential audience. But clickbait made sure the half they still had, paid three times as much attention. The hardest part: the MSM will no longer be seen as reliable news sources, or reliable only for half the population. How do they regain that audience?

They can’t turn on Biden, or Kamala, or Obama or HIllary. Those are all part of the deal that brought us Russiagate, Mueller, the Steele dossier and impeachment 1.0. All entirely empty hollow stories, ergo: ideal for generating clickbait. So who will they turn on once they’re done with Trump? They can’t risk creating sympathy with the Donald either, so making him the underdog is risky.

 

If we follow the Faust analogy, the obvious question becomes: how are the media going to save their souls? Interestingly, there are different versions of the story. The original German folk legend is from about 1500. The first written version, from Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe (some say Marlowe IS Shakespeare), from about 1600, Goethe’s Faust from 1800. “In the early tales, Faust is irrevocably corrupted and believes his sins cannot be forgiven; when the term ends, the Devil carries him off to Hell.”

But Goethe changed this. His Faust “ends with the titular character evading damnation and finding redemption in God’s grace and love for other people, with Mephistopheles losing his hope of attaining Faust’s soul. Ultimately, Faust goes to Heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels, who arrive as messengers of divine mercy, declare at the end of Act V: “He who strives on and lives to strive / Can earn redemption still” (V, 11936–7).”

It is Gretchen, a young girl “debased” by Faust, whose purity and forgiveness ultimately salvages him. In the context, it is suggested she perhaps stands for all of womanhood. We’re in an allegory, after all. Ergo, the media will have to earn redemption “through God’s grace, divine mercy and their love for other people.” And whatever that may be, it sure sounds like the opposite of clickbait. Or the devil will come to carry them off into Hell. And all this time they made you believe it was Trump who was Mephistopheles.

It will be interesting to watch. How will they save their souls, their integrity, their credibility, their revenue? Or will they be dragged into Hell never to be heard from again?

Selling your soul, your integrity, never comes cheap. The MSM are about to find that out, as are the social media giants who pretend to have the authority to decide who can speak and who must be silenced in a world that until recently hailed free speech.

Or we can just lose it all, and obey our new masters. Mephistopheles would be so delighted if we do.

 

 

 

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Home Forums The Mephistopheles Media

Viewing 19 posts - 1 through 19 (of 19 total)
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  • #68821

    Ary Scheffer Faust in his Study c1840     The essence of the story of Faust is simple: He is a man who sells his -future- soul to the devil
    [See the full post at: The Mephistopheles Media]

    #68823
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Just read interesting interpretation. We have the “hollow” party. They are exclusively “past-looking”. Why? Same coin: two sides. They are the party of things past, actions past, choices past, people past. The party of secrets past. That’s the real prize they are fighting for. To keep their past, their secrets, their blackmail hidden.

    …And you notice clearer than ever that is BOTH parties, 95% one, 90% the other. With Fox news thrown in for controlled dissent.

    So tell me, how does a lumbering geriatric dinosaur party, which is now made of so few people you could put them in a college auditorium, going to create a beautiful new vision for the future to sell and deliver to people?

    They can’t. They’re hollow. And the extent to which they are entirely hollow, formless, illusionary, with neither strength nor legitimacy, grows starker every day with every renewed, obsolete, tone-deaf, pointless, past-facing action.

    Why would I have to do anything? I’ll just let you talk. You’re digging faster than I could ever dig for you.

    One angle, from yesterday: “The strategies to date have managed to ‘successfully’ shift infection risk from the professional class to the working class.” Very true, and there is a new caste of unclean “untouchables” we hope will die. Except they say and think they’re IN the Club but they’re OUT. Same as the Deplorable workers, the “professional class” is also under house arrest and infinite martial law, free to die in droves, the level of “freedom” doesn’t begin until you own your own palatial estate with extensive lands. Then nothing in your day is affected by the rules, and if they are, you just go to $800 dinners with the California AMA after having your hair done mask-free.

    And this sort of thing is going to stand? This gives you legitimacy? Already half the country thinks you’re illegitimate so again as said elsewhere — it doesn’t matter if the elections are real or not — 80M people already SAY they’re not, and they’re not going away. There aren’t prisons enough for half the nation. They’ve done nothing to shore up legitimacy and credibility. It doesn’t take many people to be a) purged offline b) harassed and erased and leaving legacy news or c) Biden screwing and arresting his own supporters to find you’re in the minority. That suddenly 80% of the country is against Joe and the news, against the “CCCP,” the Criminally Corrupt Compromised Uni Party of RINOs and Dinos, as stated here.

    I’m sure that $600 will make it all better. Orange Man Bad.

    Hollow. Empty. Takes but a puff, a whisper, to knock them over and out. Or that other problem: they have to stop ALL truth. EVERYWHERE. Forever. Admitting one tiny secret, one lie, like 40,000 people per rally vs 400 for Biden, YouTube ratios of 10,000:1 against, if that gets out, it leads to the next secret, the next lie. If so, how is Joe the most popular president in human history? And the next lie: if THAT’S fake, then how was he elected? If THAT’S true, then what did they have over the State officials and courts? If THAT’S true, then how bad is it? How deep? In a world of open gay sex and crack-smoking, $1B open cash transfers what possible crimes could be so grave they need to be MORE secret?

    ANY lie leads to ALL lies. ANY truth leads to ALL truths. So their enemy as I’ve said many times but perhaps not seeing through to the end is, their enemy is now #Logos. REALITY ITSELF. They have to throw infinitely-increasing effort and repression, fascism, or the lid blows off and it all comes down.

    Not enviable. But how does this affect me? I don’t tell lies. I’ll just stand over here and watch physics unfold.

    “We’re an empire now and we create reality.” How’s that workin’ out for you?

    #68824
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    Raúl redeems!

    A lesser interpretation: Welcome to the World of Malignant Narcissists where projection of flaws onto unwitting targets is slightly less toxic than acquisitive projective identification ie. the ability to acquire traits and attributes from unwilling targets.

    There is no Devil, just something much worse

    #68825
    papanca
    Participant

    @Raul

    Brilliant analogy! Thanks for that.

    #68827
    analoguy
    Participant

    Great post. You must have already read this.

    https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting?s=09

    A concrete example of what’s happened to MSM journalism.

    #68828
    Noirette
    Participant

    The USA – MSM is done for. (Imho, just one angle, there are others.)

    They went for clickbait by over-covering Trump (pre-2016) in the belief that all was as usual and Clinton would win. The MSM and the Pol. Establishment were indeed taken by surprise, they believed their own hubris, polls, predictions, glorious future, and so on. Their misplaced confidence, in-groupy blinkers led to the Trump win as traditional procedures, say vote-counting and reporting, were laid down and many, most, followed them.

    A horrible, shocking humiliation for the PTB, which lead to a determination to do all it takesto prevent such a thing from ever happening again. >> See the 2020 Prez. election.

    The MSM, which should now include goog / other search, aggregators, and Social Media (platforms for ppl to communicate), in a kind of melding of news, analysis, control of information and its spread / judged correctness, authenticity, as well as conduits for advertising, sales, and propaganda of various kinds …did a classical over-reach. They could do it all, then did nothing well.

    In their collective drive for revenues and expansion they followed the ‘metrics’ (how many users, how long, how much is the data worth, what sales accrued, how much we charged, etc.) which lead to crapification – a staple of quicko-profit capitalism.

    Plus, since, say 2014 (not treating the before that, long history) the MSM + goog, twit, FB, chose their side. As run by part of the well-paid professional-managerial class, supposedly ‘savvy’ and ‘innovative’ etc., clever people who ‘hate racism,’ are sophisticated and socially ‘liberal’ and FAR removed from ‘deplorables’ etc. and support neo-lib + neo-con stances (pro-war amongst others) are now stuck with their subservience to a kind of Uni-Party that dictates to them (to Dorsey: censor pro-Trump accounts for ex.)

    They have sealed their fate as mouthpieces, channelers and censors. Uniparty media messages are almost always over time either ignored, laughed at, or reviled. See the USSR.

    #68833
    Dr. D
    Participant

    They certainly didn’t do it for the money. They’re collapsing and all conservative media is booming. Despite every threat they can muster. Like this:

    BreakinEggs
    Now how come people are fearful and alarmed at our beneficent overlords who say this through all institutions of power? Must be some misunderstanding they’re not smart enough to understand. Having seen this for decades, I wouldn’t overreact, but should we instead believe they’re all complete liars? What would it mean if we did? Either way is not complementary.

    If not money, what IS driving their self-interest? I mean, isn’t that odd? And if you ask the question, and dare look for an honest and true answer, what then?

    Opinions are treason. The only enemy is the truth. Ask Assange.

    #68834
    Topcat
    Participant

    I’m keeping an eye on alternative social media platforms like Telegram I’ve used for years, mostly to communicate across international borders, not as a way to avoid censorship from an authoritarian regime.

    Bedpan Beijing Biden and the Uni-party now qualify as an authoritarian regime so we’ll see where this leads….

    Max Keiser had a guest awhile back, I can’t remember the name, who said that zero percent interest rates would herald depopulation, they go hand in hand over the event horizon. Zero percent rates were a leading indicator of culling the herd.

    The 400,000+ ‘covid’ deaths in the US aren’t going to be asking for any benefits or pensions. Most insurance companies and pension funds stopped getting the 7% or so annual return they needed to stay above the waterline starting in earnest back in 2008. They could use a break in the number of people demanding checks.

    In addition to zero percent interest rates, Max has always said that companies buying back their own stock, which historically was very illegal, but is now standard operating procedure, is very far from being healthy. He said it’s a kin to a dog eating it’s own vomit and thinking it’s a great second helping.

    Old White Joe is going to crash the bus after he throws a lot of his foes under it.

    Wall Street is juggling Chickens and Chainsaws at this point.

    #68835
    Saul Goodman
    Participant

    @ Dr. D, always looking for opinions on what an honest and true answer might be.

    @ All, being newer here to commenting but always a fan of this page and the comment section, I still find it odd that people do not see how the stage has been set, they get a sniff of some truth, gains traction, and turned into a conspiracy theory gone dead.

    Over this entire last year of politics, people would desperately want my opinion on who I am going to vote for, I assured them i was politically agnostic and that if they understood finance and money creation, they too would see where the real inaction is for the common person just trying to earn a living, save up some of that money, and be happy.
    …its the last thing they want.

    Also, I watched the first season of True Detective on HBO again after being out for 6 years, seemed more interesting now than back then.

    #68836
    WES
    Participant

    Not that I travel any more, can’t afford to, but airports losing constant CNN is a sure sign CNN could no longer afford such luxury. Of course, there were no longer any eyeballs watching either!

    #68837
    WES
    Participant

    TopCat:

    Zero interest rates do indeed cull the herd! It destroys people’s “real” capital. Capital is instead replaced by newly printed money. That means capital now has no value!

    Since existing capital cannot grow, it will shrink as people eat their capital just to survive.

    Many people still don’t understand why the Russian communist hit the wall after 70 years in power. They simply ran out of other people’s money! The communist squandered all the wealth that had been acquired by the Russian people up until the revolution in 1919.

    We in the west are doing our own “zero interest” version of communism! We are eating our existing wealth!

    I agree “chickens and chainsaws” shouldn’t mix!

    #68838
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    I find it curious that with all this talk about zero interest rates and the subsequent loss of capital; there is no mention of debt.
    Debt is the single most important consideration in the overall view of our present situation.
    And yet debt is the least understood and most important consideration in overall economic health; especially on a personal level.
    Zero debt and true stores of value (gold, etc.) is the only effective hedge against the galoots and their financial chicanery (Zirp)…

    #68840
    John Day
    Participant

    Right you are, V. Arnold so I’ll post what I think has already been posted ,and it’s Michael Hudson, so it’s always worth reading again.
    The Consequences of Moving from Industrial to Financial Capitalism
    MICHAEL HUDSON AND PEPE ESCOBAR
    https://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-consequences-of-moving-from-industrial-to-financial-capitalism/

    #68841
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Thanks Dr. John.
    Excellent link to Hudson and Escobar; long read, but well worth for a great economic lesson…it’s all there…

    #68843
    WES
    Participant

    John Day:

    An interesting read the above link you provided.

    The only real question I have is who in China gets to decide what and where infrastructure is built. That one person gets to commit tremendous resources leaving everyone else short of resources. That one person gets to decide what future resources are committed towards maintaining possible unlikable infrastructure. This system still has critical weaknesses built into itthat are not immediately obvious especially if mistakes are made.

    An example of such a boondoggle was Canada’s Pierre Trudeau senior deciding to build a giant airport well north of Montreal with no way for passengers to easily reach Montreal. No airlines wanted to land there. They all refused to leave the airport on the island of a Montreal. No airline passengers wanted to land there either! The only way all the International airlines avoided being arbitrarily forced to move to the useless airport was their government’s threatened to do the same thing to all the Canadian airlines!

    Today this airport barely operates as a trans cargo hub only. It is a huge big white elephant to central planning! The same Trudeau idiot tried to do the same thing in Toronto but was only stopped by kicking him out of office. You may notice that our current prime minister, the son Justine, looks a lot like Fidel Casto! Justine is so popular internationally, like his dad, that he doesn’t get invited to visit anybody!

    #68848
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Or we can just lose it all, and obey our new masters. Mephistopheles would be so delighted if we do.

    I should think that is a fitting end to our present reality……..
    Otherwise, I see no future for us who are determined to go through to our own vision of reality…

    #68851
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Very smart. It’s a few iterations in, but certainly true.

    Interest is the time value of money. That is, it’s not money, it’s TIME. Time is what? The hours of your very life, your God-spark existence. Zero rates mean YOU, your work, the hours of your life are WORTHLESS to us.

    Obviously for other reasons this is also a complete #OppositeLand lie. The lie allows them to STEAL your life, as a life-sentence, which is slavery: the rejection of the fact that human beings have value. All these things are the same, so the zero or negative interest rates will correspond to zero or negative value for human life. …Until you do something about it, reject the original lie, return to God and #Logos and kick them out.

    #68855
    Noirette
    Participant

    V. Arnold wrote. Debt is the single most important consideration in the overall view of our present situation. And yet debt is the least understood and most important consideration in overall economic health; especially on a personal level.

    Yes, absolutely! Underline it… (I do plan to read Hudson’s book on the topic.)

    Zero debt and true stores of value (gold, etc.) is the only effective hedge against the galoots and their financial chicanery (Zirp)…

    Yes in a general sense. But… gold as a store of value .. Or, the very concept of store of value itself!

    Gold, just like silver, or tulips, wonderful works of art, rare stamps, diamond tiaras, etc. is only a store of value insofar as other humans ascribe value to it. It makes a good store because it is pretty, stable and inalterable, portable – even a lingot can be carried in a bag.. (Yes, it also has some industrial usages.)

    Ex: I possess a gold ring, it is quite handsome and heavy, it belonged to a family member who tried to sell it near the end of WW2 without success (for anything really..) which is why I have it. It was worthless. The Germans had already taken all the gold plus other metals they wanted, and people around were starving and would only exchange for food or useful items such as nails, blankets, bicycle tires, socks, cigarettes…

    #68893
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    Honestly, I think the thing Donald Trump would hate the most would be if people could just forget and stop talking about him, forever.

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