I know that no one is required to show up for every argument, but the rank ignorance of American civics and the deranged shrieking hysteria surrounding the recent Supreme Court ruling merits at least a passing comment.
Let's get a couple of things straight: The court did not ban abortion, and it's not on a personal vendetta to destroy women. The court simply returned the right to regulate abortion to the states, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in a federal republic. The Tenth Amendment exists for a reason.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a bastion of women's rights and judicial liberalism if ever there was one, said that Roe went too far. Instead of addressing the most extreme state limits on abortion rights that existed at the time, the court overstepped its bounds and essentially wiped every state abortion law off the books in one fell swoop, inventing an implied national right to abortion in the Constitution as it did so.
The problem is, the argument behind Roe was constitutionally weak, and therefore always susceptible to being overturned. Ginsburg, who argued that "measured motions" work better than "doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped," knew this to be true. States were already in the process of liberalizing their abortion laws when Roe was decided in 1973, but Ginsburg said that the ruling "invited no dialogue with legislators" and instead "seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators' court," while in Europe the abortion question was rightly being decided by legislators elected by the people and by public referendums, not by unelected judges.
And that's how we ended up where we are today: An activist court used a flimsy legal argument to decide national abortion law by judicial fiat. This is always what happens when judges think they're legislators in robes, making law from the bench rather than simply interpreting and ruling on the laws already on the books.
Judges need to leave the legislating to the legislators. Abortion-rights activists have had half a century to push their lawmakers to draft legislation, either on a state or national level, which would have ended this debate that comes up in every election cycle. They also could have worked on a constitutional amendment. Instead, they relied on an instance of judicial overreach and now act shocked when one of their own judicial heroes warned them this day might come.
But let's also be candid here and admit that the reaction to the overturning of Roe speaks volumes about the degree to which raw emotion and uninformed opinion drive so much of our society today. If people think the answer to the overturning of a bad ruling is to kill Supreme Court justices, for example, then it's little wonder the same group of people also tend to argue so passionately for gun control: Because they lack the ability to control their own emotional impulses, they don't trust themselves not to go on a murderous rampage, so they assume everyone else would be the same. It's classic projection. And what we're seeing in reaction to the ruling is far more a call for actual insurrection than anything that happened at the 1/6 Capitol demonstration.
And let's be frank here. Look at the reactions in this compilation video, as in any many other videos floating around online. (This one is so raw, in fact, that YouTube has age-restricted it; you have to click through to YT to watch it.) If you're this lacking in impulse control, then it's no wonder you want abortion on demand. There is a correlation.
So forgive me if I lack sympathy when your position is "agree with me or I'll destroy you." Or, if you're a Supreme Court justice, "If you don't let me kill my baby, I'll kill you." Stop acting like a petulant child. I refuse to engage with you if you're incapable of acting like more than a 3-year-old who was told she can't have cookies for dinner. Grow up.
All you do is alienate people when you act like this. See, wanting the choice to abort is one thing, as is keeping abortion "safe, legal, and rare." But shouting your abortion like it's something to be proud of, akin to some kind of holy sacrament, only tells me how unhinged your mindset has become. It makes it really hard to warm up to you when you either want me dead or you cram your politics down my throat and demand my constant active vocal praise for every single thing you do and say.
It also says a lot about how little these people value human life, given that they are, after all, engaging in screaming meltdowns over the fact that they think they no longer have the right to kill unborn humans. (Of course, they're not human until they're wanted, conveniently. Just as saying you're the opposite sex magically makes you the opposite sex now, saying you want the baby means that it magically ceases to be a "clump of cells" or a "product of conception.")
They always push too far and become their own worst enemies, alienating people who might otherwise find common ground with them. Just like this entire month, when we're practically ordered to bow down to the rainbow mafia and show our unwavering fealty to one of the seven deadly sins, pride. What started out as a sincere push for equal rights has metastasized into "praise me, you bigot," with the power of every major institution of power behind it. If you ever wondered what primitive Christian zealotry looked like, with its inquisitions, its attacks on science and logic, and its rigid puritanical intolerance, you're seeing it now, just with different dogmas being pushed and different holy symbols being foisted on you.
Let's not also forget that if your state bans abortion as a result of the reversal of Roe, you can still drive to another state to terminate your pregnancy. And you can always petition your own state's legislators to change the laws. Do something instead of complaining, if you don't like the way things are.
And I know this comes as a surprise to a lot of people, but the primary purpose of sexual activity is reproduction. You are engaging in an act that carries the potential to create new life, because that's precisely what it's designed to do. If you don't want the responsibility of becoming a parent, it's exceedingly easy to avoid that result. You either abstain or you use contraception, which is cheap and easily available. It's not the government's fault if you get pregnant, or its responsibility to clean up your mess. Take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions.
Look, I don't care if you want to terminate your pregnancy. That's on you. And at a minimum, I agree that there need to be allowances for pregnancies arising from nonconsensual sexual activity, and for cases of severe fetal abnormalities and a significant heath risk to the mother. But those abortions account for a small fraction of the whole. Most are performed as a method of birth control, which is unnecessary and irresponsible. But if you don't like what's happened with Roe, stop blaming a court for doing its job in throwing out a bad ruling. Stop screaming about it on social media. And get your legislators to do something about it.
Sorry to say, you might even have to get a male legislator involved. But since men can get pregnant and no one can define what a woman is, that shouldn't be a problem, right?
And also, if you argued in favor of mask and vaccine mandates at any point over the past two years, then you have abandoned any moral right to now go around proclaiming "my body, my choice." Sorry, you can't have it both ways.
Can we please stop acting like emotionally stunted children for a change?
It's amusing to see leftists out themselves as the enemies of free speech we always knew they were. After The Babylon Bee was banned from Twitter for daring to point out that men are not women and can never be women, Elon Musk asked a sensible question of his Twitter followers.
The poll results speak for themselves.
Musk followed up by pointing out, as I've been arguing for ages, that social media functions as the modern-day public square, and that if you can't speak freely in the public square, the free dissemination of ideas is under threat, and all you end up with is one-sided propaganda.
Musk asks if a new platform is needed... but then he got the idea to up his own stake in Twitter, with an eye toward buying it and taking it private.
Cue the hysterics from the "tolerant" left.
Free speech on Twitter is a threat to health and human rights:
In fact, free speech on Twitter is a threat to freedom itself:
Not just a threat to freedom, but a threat to the survival of the entire planet:
That's right, Nazis. And not the Ukrainian ones we pretend don't exist.
Yes, Jeff, because allowing people to speak freely on a public platform is exactly like book-burning Nazism.
So you get the gist of all this hysterical left-wing bedwetting, right? Free speech is terrifying. In fact, it's fascism.
Sounds like something Orwell would have said. But as you may recall from Justin Trudeau's attacks on Canadian truckers, this is exactly the upside-down way these people think:
Max Boot, the biggest shill you'll ever find for woke neoliberalism, could have drawn that last cartoon: He literally thinks free speech is a threat to democracy. I'm not joking. He's Genuinely Frightened, like these people always are. Ideas that they disapprove of are an existential threat to them. (And why am I not the least bit surprised that he's virtue-signaling with a Ukrainian flag in his profile?)
That's why he's always so enthusiastic about the censorship of conservative voices. That's just the "free market" at work, you see.
But I really love the ones who, in reaction to Musk's defense of free speech, are showing the world just how little self-awareness they possess. Of course, that's giving them the benefit of the doubt. They could just be raging hypocrites.
Walking yourself out to the curb, Travis?
It's OK when the oligarchs we like do it:
"Private companies can do whatev... oh, wait."
There it is for all the world to see. All the selective bans, all the narrative-controlling "fact-checks"... that's what this has always been about. Now they're just admitting it out in the open, to the point that they characterize free speech as a threat to freedom.
But if, as these same people always say, over and over again, that private companies can do whatever they want, then why would they care if Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter and do whatever he wanted with it? Hmm, gosh, they must not have really meant what they said. OK, maybe they really are all raging hypocrites.
Since Twitter has now implemented a poison pill aimed at blocking Musk's takeover of the company, I think he'd be wise to pour his resources into creating a viable free-speech social media platform to challenge Twitter, Facebook, and all the other Silicon Valley totalitarians getting off on controlling what people can say on their platforms. Or he could invest in one of the many alternatives that already exist, like Minds.
That's the thing. The alternatives are already out there, but no one will use them. They'd just rather hang out on the Silicon Valley platforms that hate them and complain but do nothing when they or their friends get "fact-checked" or banned. But if Musk got himself, and his money, involved, that could change everything.
It's way past time for these social media monopolies to be regulated like utilities. But we know that no one in Washington has the guts to do that. Most politicians are happy to use these same monopolies as a way to do an end-run around the First Amendment and engage in corporate censorship by proxy. So it's up to people like Musk to take action.
But if we want the situation to get better, not only will Musk have to do something big -- but the people who use social media and care about the free exchange of ideas will have to take some initiative as well.
Wallace, Idaho, is one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it places. This tiny town, nestled in a valley between two mountain passes, was once billed the Silver Capital of the World, a boast that was not misplaced in its mining heyday. Today, Wallace and its surrounding communities rely mostly on tourism to survive. Wallace itself is filled with restaurants, hotels, and little artisan craft stores to attract road-weary travelers who may be looking to hop off I-90 for a break as they make their way to someplace else. It's a nice place to live. We've even had a few movies filmed here, including the 1997 action-adventure flick Dante's Peak.
Wallace continues to thrive because of the ingenuity of its residents and a healthy sense of humor. Among the attractions you'll find here are an honest-to-goodness bordello museum -- prostitution existed in the open, in this town of lonely mining men, until the 1980s -- and a manhole cover proclaiming the spot of the Center of the Universe, mocking the EPA's declaration, upon setting up a Superfund site here, that it couldn't prove whether local pollution was due to mining or natural occurrences. Wallace's response? We're the center of the universe. Prove that we're not.
That's the funny part. Here's the ingenious part: As Wallace faced the threat of destruction when the feds wanted to run the interstate through town, the locals fought back by placing the entire town on the National Register of Historic Places, forever putting major developments, for good or bad, off limits. The result is a charming, picturesque downtown frozen in time, and a viaduct that carries I-90 around, rather than through, town.
Under that viaduct runs a paved bike trail where the railway used to be. Wallace also hosts a huge flea market under there in late summer.
Recently, though, some local kids who lack any of the evident smarts that characterize this quirky little town decided that the wall at the west end of the viaduct, along with the surrounding posts and pavement, was their mural to deface as they pleased.
My family moved here from Seattle, and we don't miss its urban blight, among many other of the unpleasant things that come with living in a big city. Well, if anyone else missed the delights of vulgar inner-city graffiti, fear not: It's now made its way to rural North Idaho.
I find it telling that one of the mental giants who vandalized the viaduct signed his work with his name. Nearby is a painting of the letters WHS, short for Wallace High School, which sits right across the street from the scene of the crime.
In a town of 791 people (as of the 2020 census), there can't be that many teenage boys named Brian. I'm just saying that it couldn't possibly be that hard to track down the culprit, especially with Brian giving us a helping hand. And oh, did I mention that the county cops are headquartered here in Wallace, too?
In fact, the local presence of the police was perhaps the inspiration for this fine piece of BLM-aligned tagging in our 97%-white town:
If you're unfamiliar, ACAB means "All Cops Are Bastards."
Let me pause for a minute here and explain something to you vandalizing cretins: I don't like cops, either. I think most of them are decent guys just trying to keep their communities safe, and so far I've had nothing but positive experiences with the cops around here. However, the inherent problem with policing, as I see it, is that power too easily goes to people's heads, and I think way too many guys on power trips long to put on the badge just so they can legally exert authority -- often violent authority -- over the people. But whatever side you come down on, do you understand why the police exist? They exist because of people like you, who deface and destroy things that don't belong to you. You are apparently too young and/or naive to make the connection.
And that brings me to your adorable little "anarchy" tag.
Thanks for perpetuating the stereotype of anarchists as shiftless, violent vandals and thugs with no respect for other people's property. The reality is that anarchism could never flourish without the exercise of self-control. If you don't want people in power exerting authority over you, then you have to give them no reason to do so, by living according to a personal code of self-restraint, responsibility, and respect for boundaries. What's someone else's is not yours to do with as you wish, which means you have no claim over public property or anyone else's private property. Mark up your own property all you want. Leave everyone else's alone.
I'm taking the time to explain this to you because I'm an anarchist in principle. I believe that J.R.R. Tolkien was right when, in telling his son why his political views were leaning more toward anarchism -- "philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs" -- he proclaimed that "the most improper job of any man [...] is bossing other men," adding, "Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." (Can't you just hear Bilbo Baggins rattling that last sentence off as he addresses the well-wishers at his eleventy-first birthday party?)
Likewise, Ursula LeGuin described her vision of anarchism as "not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with," but rather a political ideal rooted in "solidarity [and] mutual aid," as laid out in "early Taoist thought" and "expounded on by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman." You edgy vandals should stay in school, head to the library, and read a little bit about all of them, throwing a little Chomsky in for good measure, before you decide to spray-paint another circle-A when you clearly have no idea what it is you're supporting.
The point is, if you oppose authoritarian systems that use violence to control populations, then how are you any better if you think it's OK to violate something that isn't yours?
Ammon Hennacy, perhaps my favorite anarchist, drove the point home when he said: "An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave." Once you understand the gravity of that sentence, you'll understand why vandalism in the name of anarchism will never get you anywhere. If you want freedom from authoritarian systems of power, then you have to be the one who sets the example and takes the high road.
One more of your lovely pieces of "art" before I wrap it up:
"Fuck the system. Obey yourself."
OK, but what if yourself tells you to go out and murder someone? "The system" is broken and ultimately illegitimate, but you can't just replace it with pure selfish anything-goes egotism. If anything, you need to obey your conscience, so you can weigh the good and bad of each situation, pondering the consequences of your actions, before you act. There's an old saying that applies well to this situation: "Liberty is not license to do whatever you want to do. It is the freedom to do what you ought to do." If you managed to throw off all external systems of authority, would you have the clarity of mind, the maturity, the responsibility, to ensure that your choices minimized harm to others? If not, then don't be surprised when someone in your anything-goes anarchist paradise organizes an armed militia to make you think twice. Then you're right back to having a police force exerting control over you. Doesn't sound so great, does it?
The reason I say that I'm an anarchist in principle is that I don't think humans are capable of self-governance. I wish they were, but your defacing antics are a painful reminder that we're always going to need authority figures to intervene when people lack the self-discipline to respect other people and their property.
Maybe Brian will do right by his community and step forward to take responsibility for the act of vandalism he and his friends committed. Man up, Brian. Show us what a real anarchist is made of -- one who takes personal responsibility for his actions and doesn't need a cop to make him behave. I'll personally meet you under the viaduct -- as I hand you a toothbrush to scrub off every last bit of graffiti.
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.
In particular, I went to my LinkedIn page, which I barely ever visit. And this place that I thought was supposed to be based around social networking to land a job was inundated with Ukraine supporters, people using pronouns in their usernames, and endless talk about "equity" and "diversity" and "inclusion." This followed previous days' glimpses in my everyday life of things like an NCAA TV ad that featured a snippet of a BLM march in a favorable light, and a trip through Walmart that revealed a little rainbow-colored puzzle piece on a T-shirt about boundless love and a new version of Hasbro's game of Life that now includes multicolored game pegs -- because pink and blue for boys and girls were just so retrograde, apparently. And that's not to mention all the TV ads that, as I saw someone else recently quipping, left him thinking that America is 95% black and gay.
This image drives the point home quite vividly:
As does this little meme:
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.
Just look around if you doubt me. In our current environment, blacks, gays, transgendered people, and Ukrainians are holy people. Saints, practically. Meanwhile, COVID is the devil, Vlad Putin is the face of evil, and white males are original sin incarnate. Am I wrong?
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.
(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.
All this helps explains why, if the actual truth contradicts the empire-promoting propaganda narrative, it has to be "fact-checked" away, just like it was with all of the C-19 spin over the past two years. (Kind of like how the Trump-Russia story turned out to be a massive hoax, while the Hunter Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation" -- until it wasn't. And we're supposed to believe this same media when it said the 2020 election wasn't rigged? The extent to which they silenced skepticism about the whole thing really tells you all you need to know.)
You see, the official narrative, regardless of its relationship to the actual truth, is religious dogma that must not be opposed at any cost, because opposing the narrative threatens to undermine the power of those promoting it. And because most people uncritically lap up what authority figures tell them, the narrative neatly stands in for "the truth," and anyone who opposes it is a demon there to tempt us into sin and evil. Even if the actual truth is right there staring you in the face, you can’t accept it because it challenges what the high priests have told you. It becomes your woke dogma. And you end up no different from a fundamentalist Christian who denies the reality of evolution because the Bible and your preacher told you that evolution is a demonic lie.
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.
As I mentioned in my last post, I've come to peace with the reality that civilization is burning down and there's probably not anything that can be done to stave off a total collapse. I don't know if it'll happen in a year or a decade, but it's coming and it's inevitable at this point. We've just gone too far off the rails. We're too atomized, too fearful, too obedient to the forces that manipulate us for their own ends.
Too many people are OK with resegregation, with reverse racism, with subordinating biology to feelings, with creating a new class of untouchables and banishing them from society, with the politicization of science to manufacture and enforce specific social and political outcomes and to protect the ideologies and financial interests of our institutions of power, the likes of which we haven't seen since Galileo butted heads with the medieval church.
Too many people are incapable of independent thought. Too many people hand over their brains to the leaders of the tribes they identify with and the ideologies they're told to embrace. Too many people are too self-absorbed with whatever micro-identity they choose to make themselves feel special in a world that doesn't care about your feelings or how special and unique you are. And we're all compelled to nod our heads and celebrate as others play pretend, denying the evidence of our own two eyes, as if someone can simply identify into manhood or womanhood like they were interchangeable costumes.
We've become surrounded by legions of masked zombies, conditioned to believe that immune systems are a dangerous right-wing conspiracy, who scream at us to respect their pronouns and check our white privilege, while their Woke High Priests threaten to cancel us for violating their dogma, unless we bend the knee, rebuke our wrongthink, and confess our Original Sin of being born white.
And thus it is, in a culture where everything has to be hyperpoliticized, that logic, reason, individual liberty, personal autonomy, and the right to free thought and free speech are giving way to authoritarian superstition and irrational hysteria, as we sink into a new Dark Age.
And it's all being accelerated by a sanity-shattering climate in which humans are discouraged from even making human contact, as we're relentlessly conditioned to see every other human as a walking disease -- as if our bodies lack the ability to fight off a respiratory virus with a whopping 2% death rate.
Had I known a decade ago that the world would go so utterly insane, I probably would have opted for another pet over a child. I dread to think of the world my poor daughter will have to grow up in. So in 2022, I intend to simply do more of what's in my control to do, in hopes of making her life tolerable and our family's existence an act of quiet defiance against the status quo, inasmuch as I intend for us to live as normal a life as possible, in spite of the madness raining down all around us.
My goals for the new year, then, are as follows:
To be as good of a husband and dad as I can. That means hoping my body holds out so I can continue to provide for my family, but also making sure I balance work with personal time. My wife works tremendously hard to keep our house functioning, and I probably don't thank or support her enough for all her selfless dedication. My daughter, meanwhile, needs plenty of dad time. She comes to me to learn, to ask questions, to feel secure, to have fun. She likes playing card and board games, and she wants me to join her in some of her videogame worlds. I need to manage my time so I can do that. I know how much it will mean to her.
To be a better Stoic. We began exploring the ancient philosophy in 2021, and I think I need to keep at it. I see how angry my daughter gets at the stupidity in the world outside our door. I used to be the same way, just filled with rage at everything and everyone. It's hard not to feel that way. I've managed to find a somewhat better balance by tuning out the divisive propaganda of the 24/7 news cycle. Whatever will happen will happen, whether I complain about it or not. I used to crap all over social media griping about the state of the world, but it didn't change anything. It only served to stress me out. So why do it? No one cares, just like no one will read this blog post. But at least this is my only outlet now, and it's a rare outlet at that. I'd rather focus on what I can control and find the equanimity to tune the rest out, to the best of my ability.
To be more mindful of personal spending. Because I'm not getting any younger, and you never know what financially trying times lie ahead.
To simplify. We have a big house that's full of clutter. I have a strong desire to purge.
To try to at least maintain my current level of health. Every day is a challenge when you feel miserable all the time, you never know what affliction awaits you next, and you've given up hope that the doctors will ever figure things out. But I intend to hang in there for as long as I can. My goal is to at least see my daughter grow up.
To indulge my new hobbies of mixology and sartorial peculiarity. We're trying out a new cocktail a day, and I got a drink-a-day book for Christmas. I enjoy experimenting with various flavors and adding a bit of spirits to our meals. I've discovered that I enjoy gin, tequila, and vodka, but not so much whiskey, brandy, and rum. I already knew I enjoyed port wine, sweet reds, and some kinds of beers. So I'm just expanding my horizons to see both where things go and what flavors are out there.
As for the sartorial part, I've taken recently to wearing bow ties. I don't like neckties, but my daughter gave me the idea of trying a bow tie with my Sunday church attire. I like the way the experiment is going so far. I feel a little better about myself when I dress up and figure it might even help me feel less ill all the time, as a good frame of mind counts for a lot. And I've already noticed that people seem to treat you with more respect if you dress well. They're more likely to strike up a conversation. Or maybe it's just the peculiarity of the bow tie that acts as an icebreaker. I guess time will tell.
To continue my spiritual growth. Though I was born and raised Catholic. I've come to terms with understanding Christian teaching in a metaphorical way. It's impossible for me to take any of it literally. I continue go to church because it's comforting and familiar, and I'll probably continue to go to our local Latin Mass until the horrible, petty little bureaucratic bully of a pope that runs the church kills off the traditional Mass once and for all. I may split my time between the Latin Mass and the Byzantine Catholic liturgy, though the Byzantines live over in the jackboot people's republic of Washington, whose proto-fascist governor could at any time declare that papers be shown and useless masks be worn as a condition of entry even into a place of worship. We have none of that nonsense affecting the Orthodox church here in North Idaho, which is like the Byzantine Catholic church in all ways except that I'm not invited to communion with the Orthodox -- and I don't think I have the stamina or the patience to go through the long catechism classes that the Orthodox require before I can partake in what Christ offered freely to everyone at the Last Supper.
I'll probably continue developing my own theological system that incorporates Taoism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the Sacred Feminine, and a little bit of Hinduism and Christianity, mixed with bits of Jung, Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the idealistic pandeism of Bernardo Kastrup, the notion of a universal consciousness, and more. I have a book rolling around in my head that lays out all the tenets. I envision an intertwined three-part story that involves new scripture, an academic explanation, and an imagined conversation in an abandoned church between the Virgin Mary and Lilith, whom I envision as one of the most maligned and misunderstood characters in all of Judeo-Christian history and legend. I was going to join an online seminary program in 2022, with the end goal of taking holy orders in a few years, with the laying on of hands, apostolic succession through the Old Catholic order, and all that comes with it. I'm already an ordained minister and hold a Th.D. degree, but the idea of being an actual ordained priest holds great appeal. I just don't know if my dodgy health will hold out. Even if I started an actual church as a priest, there are periods stretching for weeks at a time where I can barely get myself vertical. So I just don't know, physically, if I could do it. That's something I need to weigh before I take the next step.
Meanwhile, my daughter, who considers herself a Taoist like her mom, is also thinking she might want to give Wicca a whirl. Being the most spiritually knowledgeable one in the house, I'll have to be the one to get her up to speed so she can properly assess the belief system and see if it's something she'll want to pursue.
I also plan to keep up our daily Zen habit of drawing ensos, to help us embrace imperfection and spontaneity. And I intend to finally go through with my plans to devote one day a week to being silent, in an effort to remind myself of how much mindless chatter we all engage in, and to cultivate my own mindfulness. I hate talking anyway, so I don't think this will be too hard.
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That's seven goals for 2022, and that's plenty. At a bare minimum, I just hope I can stay vertical and sane for another year.
We're coming up on two years of people acting like Chicken Little over a virus with a whopping 2% mortality rate. I'm pretty sure I've had The Black Plague of Our Time two or three times now. I survived, like the overwhelming majority of people do.
And yet the world out there is full of media-brainwashed and perpetually enraged people, looking at those of us who haven't forgotten that immune systems exist and blaming us for keeping the world from getting back to normal, when we're the ones who've been saying all along that if you want "normality" back, then stop hiding behind a useless mask and go out and demand it.
Granted, I imagine that if I watched the daily news and heard nothing but new variants and cases cases cases, absent of any context -- like the astronomically high survival rate, or the fact that heart disease and cancer deaths dwarf the number of C-19 deaths, yet there's no one breathlessly reporting on that every minute of every day -- I'd be in a never-ending panic too. But turn off your TV, and your only reminders of TBPoOT will be when you venture out and see all the obedient mask zombies who themselves have taken their orders from their idiot boxes.
The problem isn't the virus, or those who resist the narrative and the mandates. The problem, as usual, is those who mindlessly conform. Those who are told whom to blame and obey without reflection. Those who are fine creating an entire class of untouchables over a virus with a 98% survival rate. I look forward to seeing "Unvaccinated Only" lunch counters in the near future as our trigger-warning, safe-space, wear-your-seatbelts, risk-averse, hypervigilant, bubble-wrapped society falls off a cliff in a fit of screaming hysteria.
At least where I live, and at least for now, people are pretty chill about just living normal lives again. If I'm stuck doing business with our local freedom-loving merchants and being otherwise confined to my house and ordering the stuff I need from Amazon, so be it. I'll wait the world out till it gets this insanity out of its system, if it ever does.
In other words...
Go ahead. Burn the world down.
I look back on my nine years of blogging now and laugh at how much emotion I invested in political crap I never had any control over. And the current load of crap likewise isn't going to end until the media stops talking about it.
So go ahead.
Act like you're not a racist when you're the one cartoonishly overrepresenting minorities in advertisements, tokenizing minorities in movie roles and hiring practices, and telling white people to "check their privilege" -- i.e., telling a group of people they don't get an opinion because of their race.
Please, tell me how your vision of "equity" is not outrageous racism when, instead of seeking equality for all as Dr. King envisioned, you turn old inequalities on their head and call that progress, as if the remedy to blacks to the back of the bus is whites to the back of the bus. Didn't your mama ever tell you that two wrongs don't make a right? Have you even read the Fourteenth Amendment?
Go ahead and tell me how you support women and value science when you insist that men can identify into womanhood just by saying they're women. Tell me about how men can have a uterus and women can have a prostate. Compel me to use "they" as a singular and to call men "she" and "her" when they clearly are neither.
As long as you're compelling me to play pretend, I'm a 13-year-old handicapped black Japanese lesbian android dog. Prove I'm not, you small-minded bigot.
And as long as we're celebrating body identity disorders rather than telling mentally ill people to get help, let's help anorexics feel good about being anorexic. It's the exact same concept, after all.
Meanwhile, remind me how "male" and "female" are not biological realilites but mere "social constructs" and costumes you can change at will, since all humans are just amorphous interchangeable blobs with different plumbing. Please, please, prevent me from stating the glaringly obvious truth that I can see in front of me with my own two eyes. Don't let me proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. Go ahead. Keep on gaslighting me.
Speaking of womanhood, show us how utterly demented your value system is when you try to cancel "Baby, It's Cold Outside," hearing it as a rape song when its female character is actually being playful and coy, essentially saying to her date, "Propriety says I shouldn't stay, but I actually really want to." And then you turn around and praise the vulgar, degrading porn of "WAP" to the heavens. I'm sure you'll lecture me on feminism anyway.
And speaking of Christmas, keep on letting tiny minorities dictate what we can do, say, and think. When 90% of the nation celebrates Christmas, please do insist that I say "holiday" instead so I don't run the risk of offending 10% of the population. (Funny how this word-policing never happens at Easter, still mostly a religious holiday, and one that often falls adjacent to Passover, a major Jewish holiday, which Hanukkah is not. But no one said the social-justice warriors acted with logic. In fact, they pretty much run on irrational emotion.)
When a tiny group of people think they're something they're not, you'll compel us all to say "pregnant people" instead of "pregnant women" because a few loose screws think men can actually get pregnant. And please, speaking of "WAP," let's reduce women to their body parts, calling them "people with vaginas," to make the Gender Propagandists and a few deluded people feel better about themselves.
And of course, force us to wear useless, porous masks and get vaccines as a condition for participating in society over a virus with a 2% death rate.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: Minority rights are one thing. Minority rule is another thing entirely. The former is a hallmark of a free and open society; the latter can only be achieved through bullying authoritarian control of the majority. The last time a minority controlled the majority so thoroughly as we see now, it was called apartheid. That didn't work out so well. Tyrannies never do, whether it's a tyranny of the majority or of the minority.
It's like one wise person recently observed: It used to be that if five people wanted to play basketball and four wanted to play volleyball, the majority won and we played basketball. (And then we might squeeze in a game of volleyball, just to be fair.) Nowadays, if eight people want to play basketball and one person wants to play volleyball, we don't play anything at all, because everything is black and white, all or nothing, and we can't risk offending the non-basketball-identifying person. In fact, let's hold the volleyball fan up as a forgotten hero, struggling under the weight of the privilege of all the evil basketball fans who are oppressing his will.
And oh, do tell me how it's OK to impose your gender-neutrality on a gendered language. That's how you end up with the non-word monstrosity Latinx in place of Latino and Latina. No one asked for your linguistic colonialism, but being the perpetual white savior you are, you're going to impose it on Spanish for the language's own good. You never could shake that habit of thinking you speak for all minority groups, could you? Half a millennium ago, the ignorant Indians needed the Bible. Now the ignorant gendered Spanish language needs Latinx when it never even asked for it or knew it needed it.
You see, Puritanism never dies. It just takes different forms. Now, instead of confessing in a church, we grovel on bended knee before the High Priests of the Woke as we atone for our ideological sins, lest we be excommunicated from our livelihoods. Woe to the one who holds the wrong opinion, for he -- ahem, they -- shall be canceled. But alas, there is no true redemption here, especially for those contaminated by the New Original Sin of being born white.
Seriously, burn it all down. I don't care anymore, and I can't stop you anyway.
In the midst of all this insanity, I've taken to spending my Sundays at Latin Mass. And even there, I'm happy to say that after years of wringing my hands over finding the right religious/spiritual community for me, I'm OK not believing in a literal sense what 99% of the other folks there do. I believe there's something bigger than us out there, beyond this Earth and this life, and I think all religions are taking their best stab at what that is. They're all certain they've found the answer, and they argue with each other and condemn each other, when no one really knows the answers, since obviously none of us are dead yet. But I found peace in a crappy childhood sitting in the quiet beauty of our local Catholic church, and after all the years of struggle to find a spiritual home as an adult, I find I'm content just to sit in the quiet of a Latin Mass and contemplate the Big Questions silently in my own head. That's enough. And if you take the Bible as a series of metaphors, allegories, and symbols for humanity's quest to struggle with its own shortcomings and find redemption, then the overarching story still holds some value. And Mary can still be my spiritual Mom, the way she always has.
I still prefer the relaxed reverence of Eastern Orthodox worship and its comparative flexibility in regard to individual situations to the overly regimented, rigid, and foolishly legalistic Catholic approach. But having already been baptized and confirmed Catholic, I also don't have to endure a yearlong catechism just to fully participate in the service. That counts for something. Besides, if you present yourself for communion, the priest just assumes you're a Catholic in good standing and a state of grace. It's only the Orthodox who look askance at you as you approach, wanting to know who your bishop is before you'll be administered the Eucharist. Who needs that kind of control-freak drama?
But either way, I'm not there because I'm obsessed with sin and hell. I'm there because I find church a peaceful refuge from the hysteria and stupidity of the world at large. Besides, Latin Catholics are good political allies to have in these times, at least until Pope Francis shuts down the Latin Mass for good. There aren't many churches you can go to where there isn't a face diaper in sight and no one hectors you to put one on or show your papers, Nazi Germany-style. One of the Latin Mass priests recently made an ironic joke about "freedom-loving Washington" in contrast to Idaho, where the appellation actually fits. I like him. I like the church. Yeah, they're uptight and Pharisaical about proper dress and crying kids and being properly disposed to receive communion, but I would expect no less and find their hyperserious joylessness all kind of a funny affectation. As if Jesus would criticize someone for not wearing a clean, pressed cloak of the finest cloth. As if he'd turn anyone away who sought him out in the Eucharist.
The rad-trads totally miss the point of Christ's message. But then almost all Christians miss the point in one way or another. The evangelical nutters worship Paul and apparently think Jesus was just blowing hot air when he expected his followers to actually live out the values of the Sermon on the Mount. Just head up at the altar call and say you believe, and then you can act however you want for the rest of your life because your ticket to heaven is irrevocable. "Sin boldly," as Martin Luther once put it.
Yeah, keep me a mile away from those people. At least the Catholics think your salvation can be lost, so they regularly confess their sins and try to stay on the straight and narrow, which means that at least some of them actually make an effort to pick up their crosses in imitation of Christ.
And forget the liberal Christians, who reduce Jesus to a feel-good hippie, recoil from any and all theology like it was a flaming pile of dog crap, pretend that the Bible doesn't actually condemn gay people, and worship transgenderism more than they do the Almighty. Also, put on your masks for the rest of eternity, because yay faith and logic alike. Why bother going to a church like that when you could just attend a Democratic Party-sponsored political rally?
This is fine.
All of it.
As much as my health sucks, I don't know how much longer I'll be vertical on this planet anyway. I feel horrible for the garbage my daughter is going to have to endure in her lifetime. But there's not a damn thing she or I can do about it.
And when you can't do anything about it, you might as well come to terms with the fact that you can control what you control and let the rest burn down.
And then look out at the stupid world and say... that's right...
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