Bill Whittle and “Scandal Fatigue”

It’s time for another Bill Whittle video. Think of him as America’s Pat Condell. Not that they’re similar but they both energize the tiny spark of hope left among those of us who listen to them and remember when things were not quite so soiled and degraded:


The “About” section says:

Published on Jun 25, 2014

Everywhere we look today we see SCANDAL FATIGUE gripping the nation. It’s bad enough that Leftist policy has crippled the national economy; in his latest FIREWALL he explains why you shouldn’t let the Clown Car Cavalcade of Incompetence cripple YOUR economy as well. Watch and discover why America is bigger than these weenies at their worst.

If you go to the video page where this appeared, you can subscribe to his “Truth Revolt dot org”. It seems to be his new Youtube Channel. If I remember correctly the other one is/was Declaration Video. I’ll have to look it up to see if he’s running both now since his weekly emails seem to have died…or, heaven forefend, they struck out our address for our infamous Islamophobia? Nah. He’s a Tea Party guy, after all.

I’ll add a few other episodes here and there to catch up. For the most part, his polemics don’t stale date quickly. However, I will note here the complaint of a commenter posted below this new episode about twelve hours ago:

Huh? What did he say? Bill, why does every other YT video have audio I can hear, but yours and PJTV videos have inaudible sound?? Are you going tone deaf, too? Could you maybe do CC, since you clearly don’t want me to hear what you have to say?! [redacted] frustrating…

Yes, Houston, you do have an audio quality problem, whatever CC is. Oh, wait. Does that mean “captioned”? YES, please; captioning gets my vote.

So in case you Brits were wondering, it’s not just you being unable to understand American English, Americans are having the same issue with the audio here. The YouTube commenter fellow is right; I had to play this several times to hear all of it. Or most of it; I never did get it entirely. And if it weren’t the inimitable Mr. Whittle I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble.

Maybe Vlad can tell me what the problem is; Vlad is such a stickler for good audio. Perhaps he could even tell Mr. Whittle what he might do for sound remediation.

Meanwhile, another commenter there has a solution for what ails us. He says:

Go Galt, earn a few dollars under the poverty level, buy stuff used and the leeches in government will get almost nothing from you to pay for their police/nanny state.

I never have understood the “Go Galt” part of people’s suggestions. I presume this idea comes from Ayn Rand’s works, which I could never make my way through any of them. Maybe someone has the Cliff Notes? But the rest of his ideas about living under the poverty level? Check. We do that already -buy used stuff? Check. (except for food) or – gasp! -go one better and do without. Check.

We’re all set for the days when parts of America begin to resemble Moscow but with the wonderful addition of cheap Cuban coffee (made in Florida now. And Mexico).

19 thoughts on “Bill Whittle and “Scandal Fatigue”

  1. There’s a catch to that “buying used stuff” idea: Somebody has to buy it new first, and then get rid of it while it’s still perfectly useable. I’ve bought a lot of used stuff, and some of it is pretty nice. (Best deal was a gorgeous Armani jacket, retail priced in four figures, for $5.) This is possible thanks to a lot of people around me with a lot of disposable income and a disposition to spend it carelessly. So let’s not encourage them to be thriftier.

    • You’re safe, Radegunda: check out some malls and shopping centers and WalMarts. There are people shopping all the time, acquiring ever more stuff. Eventually they have to get rid of the ‘old’ stuff.

      And don’t forget the problem of “gifts”. Maybe what you perceived to be a “gorgeous Armani jacket” was a Christmas or b’day present to someone else who loathed the darn thing – wrong color, too big, or “not ME”, – or loathed the mother-in-law who gave it. So the owner stuffed it in a bag and left it at GoodWill or wherever.

      Or maybe the former owner died?

      I agree that my idea re ‘living low’ depends on others – wealthier ‘others’ – who are willing to part with their old stuff to make room for newer shinier versions of things. Lucky for us there of plenty of them.

      But some folks would build on new closets in which to store their dozens (literally) of beige blouses, with similar racks and numbers of cream/ecru, black, navy, pale blue, etc. rather than give any of it away.

      I once helped one of my customers sort and arrange her 76 pairs of underwear (yes, I counted as we went along, dividing by type and color; I was fascinated by the numbers). Then we moved on to her long, high wall of shoes, each pair with its cedar shoe trees or silk covers, or both. She wanted to devise a better system for those so we began sorting not by color but by season. And then by type of heel and toe (or lack or same), and by fabric or leather finish, and finally by color. It was obvious she was soon going to need another ‘wall’ – i.e., a top rack that swung away from the bottom layer – so I gave her the name of a good carpenter.

      Today she could go to one of those upscale closet organizing stores; a growth industry for the moment. The employees will visit your home to measure, design, build, finish and install whatever your heart and pocketbook can agree on…the full-color brochures are a wonder.

      So…no worries, Radegunda. Those of us who live much lower on the consumer chain have nothing to worry about; lots o’ stuff still flying down the chute. Just ask any used clothing store manager about the headache/expense of disposing of things NO ONE wants, not even the local bag lady.

      • Bet most of those non essentials have Made in China stamped underneath the Made in USA designer labels, not content with shipping the manufacturing base out to the Third World the national wealth is then exported in exchange for shoddy overpriced goods.

        Bill Whittle is advancing a progressive slander on the American workforce, a slander that is well advanced in the UK of white working class shirkers and welfare dependency next he will be advancing the progressive cause for the importation of a superior workforce.

        I am sure the American middle/working class do not need Bill Whittle to lecture them how to use a wrench.

  2. Perhaps Vlad could fix the BBC as well – two recent high profile dramas, Jamaica Inn and Quirke suffered from poor audio driving down audience figures.

    But perhaps Vlad has more important work as the BBC suffers from far more serious defects than mumbling actors and might as well be put out of its misery.

    ‘Quirke mumbling was so bad I watched it with subtitles’: Writer of latest BBC drama to face complaints over poor sound admits he struggled to hear what actors were saying

    http://dailym.ai/1luj9WU

    BBC blames mumbling Jamaica Inn cast

    http://bit.ly/1o8R0nV

  3. Yes, Going Galt is from Ayn Rand, specifically Atlas Shrugged. Spoilers: John Galt decides that he is not going to let other people socialize his genius and quits his job as an engineer. Deciding that the death of society is inevitable, he convinces others who are smart and ambitious to quit their work that contributes to society to speed that death along.

    That’s it in a nutshell. I’m sure others will correct me.

  4. Bill Whittle is a conservative social entrepreneur his enterprise is the socio-economic debasement of the West.

  5. A fine exposition of the American Dream, as I understand it. But what if the proverbial janitor isn’t clever enough to better himself? Without millions like him, society stops functioning; are they not entitled to a decent standard of living? Maybe especially so, as those with greater ability, even if they start out poor, can expect advancement.

    I struggled to finish “Atlas Shrugged”, as Galt and his friends were so smug and self-congratulatory, assuming they’d built their empires without the contribution of their workers- who were caricatured as similar to Molochs. Rand was conditioned against all forms of socialism, including the democratic kind, by her family’s experience of the non-democratic variety in Russia. She was also inconsistent: a believer in free love, she couldn’t handle her lover’s infidelity; an opponent of socialised medicine, she accepted it when old and ill.

    • I’ve read nearly everything Ayn Rand wrote. Yes, it’s true that she had serious flaws as a novelist, and her personal life was…problematic. Those have been rehashed many times, so I’ll merely note them and move on.

      The important thing is that as a philosopher of individual liberty, she has few peers.

      Galt and his friends were so smug and self-congratulatory, assuming they’d built their empires without the contribution of their workers- who were caricatured as similar to Molochs.

      I strongly disagree with this. The main characters in Atlas Shrugged were the titans of industry, the people who founded businesses or invented new products, which advanced the human condition. But in no way did she disdain the employees of those businesses. There were a number of instances where she described the efforts of a competent working man. She had much more respect for a janitor who took his job seriously than a corporate CEO who connived to undercut his competitors by resorting to political connections.

      The character I most identified with was Eddie Willers, who was not one of the movers and shakers. He was an employee of the railroad, who was intelligent, serious, hard-working, and fiercely loyal to his employer, Dagny Taggart. He doggedly tried to keep the business going while everything was falling apart around him.

      Rand wrote four major works of fiction. The first was “We the Living”, published in the early 1930s. She later said that it was the closest thing to an autobiography that she would ever write. It was turned down by about a dozen publishers, one of whom told her that she “didn’t really understand Communism”. It was actually an insider’s view of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It’s a powerful book, and in some ways was her best novel.

      Then came “Anthem”, published in 1938. It’s more a novella, a short work that described a collectivist world of the future. It eerily presaged Orwell’s “1984” in that certain words were banned, lest they cause people to think forbidden thoughts about individuality.

      Of course, her major novels were “The Fountainhead” in 1943 and “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957.

      Others have pointed out that today’s headlines often read like Onion-esque parodies of episodes in “Atlas Shrugged”.

      I would recommend reading her nonfiction essays. They are short, bite-sized, and focused on one topic. There are a number of collections of them, which have been republished under various titles. The first one, “The Virtue of Selfishness”, is a good place to start.

  6. On the problem of Bill’s videos being recorded too low – I bought myself a pair of speakers with the volume control on one of the speakers. Problem solved. No he booms out.

  7. “Without millions like him, society stops functioning; are they not entitled to a decent standard of living? Maybe especially so, as those with greater ability, even if they start out poor, can expect advancement.”

    Hi Mark,

    To me, your statement is inconsistent. One the one hand, you are basically arguing that everyone deserves a ‘decent’ standard of living which you omit to define except in the insinuation that the janitor deserves the SAME standard of living as amorphous others (this is a snapshot in time). Then, you argue that those with greater ability can expect ADVANCEMENT (MORE) in moving from poverty to a ‘decent’ standard of living (this is over time)! Please note that, in math, the SAME cannot equal MORE, and the SAME TIME cannot equal OVER TIME.

    Yours is a very mushy argument that:

    1) presumes that a ‘society’ owns and controls the output of its members and is correct to VIOLENTLY FORCE some members to give their earnings to other members,

    2) fails to account for the idea that the ‘greater ability’ or human output or even advancement – that provides ‘decent’ standard of living – is NOT guaranteed for either an individual or a society (which was Ayn Rand’s main point),

    3) fails to account for the idea that a ‘decent’ standard is living is a) evolving (the poorest Westerners live at a level of luxury that surpasses almost all humans over time), and b) relational (if one person has one TV and another person has 20 TVs, is the person with one TV a poor person?),

    4) appears to believe that everyone should have a ‘decent’ (equalized) standard of living based on the idea of society owing and owning its members, but also claims that advancement based on greater ability of some members is a given (given by whom?), and then claims that these two ideas can co-exist together,

    5) insinuates that people who advance will ‘automatically’ obtain that advancement through natural gifts (greater ability) rather than hard work or merit – or graft or gaming the socialist system,

    6) gives quite a lot of credit to the proverbial janitor where the uneducated janitor would NOT have a job if the educated engineer omitted to invent the weapons to defend a city, the city water system, building, and bathroom and for the proverbial janitor to clean. In other words, the educated can survive without the uneducated, whereas the inverse is less likely – and much less pleasant for all involved.

    7) insinuates that poor people are poor due to genetics (less ability) rather than moral choices (active belief in flawed moral codes, use of drugs and alcohol, participation in violence, unwillingness to defer gratification, etc.)

    8) implies the proverbial janitor deserves MORE simply based on the (unproven!) idea that other people with greater ability are able to advance.

  8. Hi Egghead, Thanks for taking the trouble over your reply. Hard to know where to respond, but in the case of the UK, I’d point out the difference between the “minimum wage”, legally enforced, at least in theory, and the “living wage”, which aspires to give people enough to live on, but has no legal backing.

    Where did you find the expression “Violently force”? I may be well to the left of your good self, and many people here, but I remain committed to democracy, with all its faults. If the wealth generated by capitalists- even “benign” ones such as Gates or Buffett, let alone those with inherited wealth, is to be redistributed, this must be by consent through the ballot box.

    Re your points 7 & 8: you should probably take up these points with, say, Takuan Seiyo rather than me. I queried the ideas put forward by Bill Whittle because his vision has no place for those unable to participate in the “American Dream”.

    • Hi Mark,

      Democracy is ‘tyranny of the majority’ (John Adams) – an unchecked majority whose edicts mainly involve taking money from other people – and taking money is really taking the time and labor of some individuals to give to other individuals – via the threat of violent force – backed up by the reality of violent force.

      It is the all too grim specter of Muslim majority democracy that strikes true terror in the hearts of the observant Westerner.

      As Westerners shall find with Muslims:

      A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. (Gary Strand, Usenet group sci.environment, 23 April 1990)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

      • Unless you favour anarchy, there must be a government with the right to raise taxes, to provide for the common good. Adams said that education should be provided by the authorities, not reliance on charity. I’m sure you’d also include, at a minimum, defence and policing. Is this tyranny?

        Beyond that it’s a matter of where one stands on the political spectrum. I disagree with recent UK governments’ privatisation of some public assets (not always with great success), but as a democrat, have to live with it.

  9. Maybe the book was upside down but I thought Ayn Rand’s words were a covert and cynical attack on free markets – very clever nonetheless. 🙂

    • Interesting idea, but…

      “Rand’s political philosophy emphasized individual rights (including property rights),[114] and she considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of those rights.[4] She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and dictatorship.[115] Rand believed that rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government.[116] Although her political views are often classified as conservative or libertarian, she preferred the term “radical for capitalism.” She worked with conservatives on political projects, but disagreed with them over issues such as religion and ethics.[117] She denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism.[118] She rejected anarchism as a naïve theory based in subjectivism that could only lead to collectivism in practice.[119]”

      “In 1991, a survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked club members what the most influential book in the respondent’s life was. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.[156] Rand’s books continue to be widely sold and read, with over 29 million copies sold as of 2013 (with about 10% of that total purchased for free distribution to schools by the Ayn Rand Institute).[157] Although Rand’s influence has been greatest in the United States, there has been international interest in her work.[7][158] Rand’s work continues to be among the top sellers among books in India.[159]”

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

      “Objectivism is a philosophical system that originated as the personal philosophy of Russian-born American writer Ayn Rand (1905–1982).[1] First developed in her novels and polemical essays,[2] it was later given more formal structure by her designated intellectual heir,[3] philosopher Leonard Peikoff, who characterizes it as a “closed system” that is not subject to change.[4]”

      “Objectivism’s central tenets are that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans’ metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and to which one can respond emotionally.”

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29

Comments are closed.