The Dissident Spook
A quick announcement and proposal.
Grug has been very busy. So busy in fact that I’ve even been cancelling my in-person events, not just online stuff. But today I got back, so expect some “content” coming out soon.
On the drive back from the airport this morning I had a good idea, which is nice since most of my ideas end up looking like this:
As a result, I had to get back here fast so I took the empty interstate at 120mph mostly the whole drive. The Bad People kept trying to place deer in my path so the route home looked like a coke-addled fucked-up game of Frogger with Russian Hardstyle for a soundtrack, but we’re here now. This may not be my most put-together essay, but it’s on an important topic and I think the concept is easy enough that I can just rant about it and you’ll get the gist. It’s also 3:00 AM so cut me some slack here
I have decided on a rebrand. Grug was fun for being a silly little goober on the internet, but it’s time to be a serious and dedicated little goober on the internet. As such, this account will be renamed to “Dissident Spook”, and the focus will be more on subjects related to what this name implies.
To briefly summarize the topics I’ll be focusing on: The “regime” as we like to call it is not one solid object, it is many parts put together. One of these parts is what I like to call the “Spook State”, the unholy alliance of the intelligence agencies, politicians, the media industry and even academia to not only provide the “regime’s” intelligence apparatus, but also to wage a campaign of psychological warfare on its populace to ensure that it never really loses control. This alliance is like a second Cathedral, but the two don’t quite get along. The “Spook State” is the other half of the equation, it’s the stuff that Chomsky is right about, whereas the Cathedral is what Chomsky’s wrong about. I’ll be elaborating on this more in an essay dedicated to the subject, but to keep it simple, all that crazy CIA stuff in the Cold War really did happen, but you’ll only really hear academics talk about coups in Latin America. The CIA and State Department may not like each other, but they’re forced to share each other’s company.
Any regime based on an ideology which requires popular consent relies on an apparatus to manufacture that consent. Part of this is academic, part is media and part is information warfare. I’m going to be picking these apart.
The second subject of this account is waging our own information warfare. A state with as heavy of a propaganda wing as ours can never be defeated unless it can be countered on this front. Memetic warfare is a real thing nowadays. As such, I’ll be exploring tactics and strategies that any listeners who stay well-organized can utilize to help counter the regime’s information warfare apparatus.
I’ve chosen this sort of material because it’s something of an area of expertise for me and I think it’s underexplored. That being said, I will still write about other topics. The first new essay on this account should be finished within a week, so keep an eye out for it. I’ll be waiting about 24hrs from the time of this essay to change the name/logo of the account and all that. As always, thanks for reading!