Over the past few years, I went through a phase of seeking out alternative media. The attempt was largely a failure because even though lots of people complain about the rampant censorship from the Silicon Valley monopolies, few seem willing to do anything about it. They won't try out the alternatives, apparently preferring to stick with FaceGoogTwit and bitch about the ever-increasing attacks on free expression until they themselves are inevitably canceled. Meanwhile, the alt-sites linger in low-use obscurity. (I can't even throw stones, as Eggshells exists on Google's Blogger. I just lack the time and, honestly, the motivation to transfer a decade's worth of posts someplace else.)
So as I've been closing accounts, seeing what I need to keep open, and consolidating email addresses, I've gotten a passing glimpse of what most people are probably immersed in every day, which is the same stuff I've done my best to tune out over the past couple of years.
This image drives the point home quite vividly:
As does this little meme:
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Look, it's not that I even care about what you look like or whom your consensual romantic partners are. It's that I'm constantly told that I have to care, and that I'm a "privileged" bigot if I don't. A political agenda is being forced on us with a fanatical religious zeal, while it simultaneously attempts to demonize segments of society and guilt-trip people into acceptance. It's great that everyone has a seat at the table, but the table ought to be round, with no one at the top and no one subjugated to the bottom. Every civil-rights movement has historically pushed toward that goal, with equal treatment of every human being and equal protection under the law.
The problem, of course, is that "equity" is not about equality. It’s about overweighting minorities -- often vanishingly small ones -- to the exclusion of the majority, which just creates a perverse kind of apartheid, a caste system based on personal values and immutable characteristics where small, aggrieved groups dictate the terms to the majority. The only thing this achieves, of course, is to turn old discriminations on their head while perversely calling it progress and justice.
And you obviously can't have progress and justice when you're trying to push an entire group of people to the back of the bus. If your idea of justice is to turn old discriminations on their head, you've achieved nothing. You're moving us backwards. You haven't brought anyone together. You've done just the opposite. You've subdivided us into infinitely smaller micro-groups that, as the Oppression Olympics of intersectional politics has demonstrated time and again, will inevitably put us at each other's throats.
This approach also teaches that your value comes from what makes you different, rather than encouraging us to look for the things that transcend our differences and unite us as human beings. It is an inherently divisive approach to life. It is a view of the world in which we focus on the narcissism of small differences to discover meaning in our lives. It is, ultimately, a way of life in which old unifying social, cultural, and religious consensuses have given way to a secular religion, in which certain "chosen" groups are glorified over others.
Moreover, with the old God fading into the rearview mirror of our dying civilization, we are all "liberated" to be our own individual gods now, able to reinvent ourselves in our own image -- since "male" and "female" are, after all, just so many interchangeable costumes and states of mind. But you are also a Latinx womxn, because to live out this emperor-has-no-clothes fantasy, you have to eliminate real-life categories that conflict with the dogma. Biological women's spaces be damned, and never mind the linguistic imperialism of de-gendering a gendered language. That's how the Woke White Saviors roll. They know better. From the days of handing out Bibles to the Indians to now, they've always known better.
Also, please note with great care everyone's skin color and their sex partners, but simultaneously ignore whether they're obviously men or women. But please do note if a child doesn't want to be his or her birth sex anymore, so we can irreversibly fill that poor kid's developing body full of hormones. Only in an environment like this could a TV commercial from a major corporation feature a mom helping her daughter put on a chest binder and act like it’s something praiseworthy, rather than a glorification of a sickness, a dissociation from self, that calls for healing rather than encouragement. It's as absurd, and as potentially dangerous, as telling the mentally ill that yes, we also hear the voices telling you to harm yourself, or telling anorexics that, yes, they really are fat, and that we support their right to purge.
In this way does this warped mindset always, always, without fail, end up celebrating deviance. Stability, tradition, normality -- all bad. But deviance and depravity of of every kind is to be endlessly praised and glorified.
Every major institution of power has been hijacked by this insane philosophy, and it showed when I unfortunately looked at my LinkedIn feed. It was all an endless stream of virtue signaling, all look at how different I am, all look at how wonderful I am for pointing out how different these people are -- but almost nothing at all about actual work skills and qualifications. It’s as if having some special niche identity, or virtue-signaling in support of those identities, is the skill and qualification now, such that how woke you are supersedes what you can actually do in the working world.
It’s like I don’t even live in the same universe with these people.
And seriously, when you take a good, hard look at the political philosophy these people live by, it's really not all that different from a fanatical Jim Jones-style cult. It's just a really big cult -- one that happens to have taken over the entire institutional Western mind. It's a result of years of societal indoctrination that seeped out from the universities and made its way into the mainstream, once the indoctrinated college grads rose to positions of authority in entertainment, education, information, and the C-suites of the most powerful corporations. Now the high priests of the media feed the dogma to the average people, and the Woke Virus spreads further and further among those most incapable of independent thought -- leading us to where we are today.
This explains why the same people who became fanatics over a virus with a 2% mortality rate have now so easily become transformed into war hawks, to the point of wanting a no-fly zone in Ukraine that would potentially spark a nuclear war. In their wild-eyed zealotry, they lack the ability to think through what they've been told to support and believe in. Even if the U.S. just gets a long-term war out of this -- which is what we seem to want, both to justify our massive military budget and to prop up Western hegemony over the planet, and we'll pin a false flag on the Russians if necessary to achieve our goal -- those in power will surely still be satisfied that they were able to fool so many people, for so long, over and over again, predictably, like clockwork. The state and the media, indeed, are Pavlov, and the masses are the dogs drooling at the dinner bell. It's furthermore safe to say that Milgram's obedience-to-authority experiments were a sad microcosm of how most human beings act.
For the mind held captive by a religious cult, there's always the need to glorify the good in the face of great evil. In short, you must resist the devil. That's how we end up with these simplistic narratives couched in simple black and white terms. Never mind that Putin's invasion actually wasn't "unprovoked," in the face of thousands of Russians killed in eastern Ukraine. Never mind that our own government has done what Putin did many times over, on even flimsier pretexts. Never mind that what's happening in Ukraine is also happening in places like Yemen, Palestine, and China.
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| (Ukraine figures accurate as of around March 10.) |
We support the Israelis and the Saudis, respective aggressors in Palestine and Yemen, so pay no attention to those ongoing human tragedies. And we rely too much on cheap Chinese labor to draw attention to the Uyghur genocide. But Russia? Well, Putin won't bend the knee to the West, and he's attacking a U.S client state with a puppet government we helped install. So the Ukrainians are helpless bystanders, martyrs in their fight against the devil himself. And because Putin is the devil incarnate, the same "anti-racist," "anti-fascist," "compassionate," "tolerant" woke leftists have now decreed that it's OK to engage in hate speech against Russian soldiers and post death threats against Devil Putin -- and that you can lavish praise on Ukraine's Azov neo-Nazi battalion. (As we saw recently when the media proved that doxxing someone is bad unless you're doxxing supporters of the Canadian convoy, if these hypocrites didn't have self-serving double standards, they wouldn't have any at all.)
Only people in the grips of a mass psychosis -- or unrestrained religious zeal -- could think like this. After all, who would oppose hate speech against the literal devil?
And so we end up in a place reminiscent of the 9/11 antiwar protests that were really more about being anti-Bush, as evidenced by the fact that the antiwar movement vanished when Obama took the White House but his foreign policy didn't change from the status quo. Now in 2022, support for Ukraine similarly isn't really so much about Ukraine but about the simple but alluring idea of siding with good over evil, resisting the devil -- just like an indoctrinated religious person would do. Why would you even think of disobeying what the high priests tell us? Are you a tool of the devil?
Then as now, we even get to dehumanize the "bad guys." Remember when the Obama administration killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen, with a drone bomb? He was given no due process. He was just a kid whose dad happened to be on the administration's terrorist hit list. When asked how the administration justified killing an innocent child, Obama advisor Robert Gibbs glibly stated that the kid should have had better parents.
Fast-forward to 2022, and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia declares that ordinary Russians are just as guilty as Putin and so deserve to suffer from the West's economic terrorism.
In minds like these, censorship is no longer even controversial. It’s just what you do to preserve the narrative-slash-dogma. Suppressing inconvenient truths is "fact-checking" against "misinformation," while promoting propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies is "truth." This is why the "free speech" West has bent over backwards to censor any and all Russian media -- we can't dare let people ponder another point of view that might make them question what the high priests feed them. Moreover, "hate" is any opinion that doesn't comply with woke dogma. Say a man can't become a woman and you get kicked off social media, but hurl actual death threats at Russian soldiers and leaders while glorifying Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and you're good to go.
In China, the censorship comes from the top down, with not only assaults on free expression but also social penalties for those who oppose the state. Justin Trudeau's authoritarian attacks on Canadian truckers were something like a trial balloon for a similar social-credit system in the West, and the global corporate isolation of Russia, complete with freezing bank accounts and seizing private assets, shows just how powerful such a system can be, and how it could be used against anyone defying the narrative. We don't need gulags anymore to silence dissent; big businesses in collusion with the government can just starve you and your family until you comply.
All this just goes to show that most people are irrational beings and will always find a religious belief of some kind to rally behind. Even the most hardcore atheists quite often make "anti-religion" their religion. Some white people revert to overt racism in the midst of all the prevailing madness, but that's also just another kind of religion. At best, it's a tribalistic cult built around pigmentation -- which is essentially just wokeness in reverse.
To the Woke, objective truths, like 2+2=4, are now white supremacy. There is no way to reason with people whose minds have been captured by such extreme religious dogma. And they're compelled to believe what they do precisely because their cult demands that they reject objective truth. Otherwise, the whole thing would unravel.
Russian culture, to its credit, has endeavored to resist this insane cult. Putin in particular has warned against the corrosive effects of wokeness, comparing it to what happened in Russia during the 1917 revolution. For all the man's faults, we would do well to listen to someone whose own nation has tragically gone down this road.
I don’t like what the West has become, and so my sympathies learn toward all those who want to resist the bullying and the corrupting influences of the decadent West and preserve the old ways -- because they are human ways, grounded in decency and reality and mutual respect. The pre-Woke world had its flaws, to be sure, but the Woke solutions to our problems are a thousand times worse, in a thousand different ways. That's not to suggest I'm a fan of Putin, who is no friend to human freedom, but I'll wager that Russia will come out of this current mess all the better in the long run for having shaken off Western influences.
Russia has survived worse than this all-out assault from the West, and its people are tough and resilient. It'll be fine in the long run. In the short term, its alliances with China are deepening -- an alliance that may well break the back of the West, given the extent to which our short-sighted greed has made us almost completely dependent on China. The Biden administration can bellow and bray all it wants about threatening China for aligning with Russia, but China knows better. It holds all the cards in this relationship.
For now, we all get our officially sanctioned Two Minutes Hate against Russia, while Wokeness reminds us that some people are more equal than others. Orwell's dystopian literature was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook -- and yet here we are.
And if you think you're not part of the problem, I'll tell you this. If you put pronouns in your profile, or your social-media picture includes you in a mask, a frame telling everyone you got a shot like a good obedient little dog, or a Ukrainian flag, then I know everything I need to know about you. You do what you're told. Your mind is not your own. You're one of Milgram's test subjects. You signal your religion every bit as much as somebody wearing a hijab or a crucifix does. You are sleepwalking through life.
I would tell you that you need to wake the hell up, but I don't think it even matters anymore, because I don't see any way back for the West at this point. The rot is too deep, the infection too widespread. I doubt I'll have much more to say about any of it. I'll just look on and shake my head, while focusing on family, work, and hobbies. I can't change what's happening. I feel terrible for what my daughter will have to live through, but the only thing I can do is look after her and my wife in the short term. In the larger world, I'm massively outnumbered, by people with lots of influence and money, who in turn brainwash the masses into compliance. I'm powerless. I've tried to fight with words and have done so for decades, and the world just gets worse and worse.
There's really not much more to say, is there? The West has lost what made it the West. It's only a matter of time until the body draws its last breath and gives up the ghost.
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