The Purge's Progress; Hell Hath No Fury Like a Sissy Scorned

You're never going to believe, grandchildren, what it was like under the Tyranny of the Twink.

The homosexual bullies of the present test my sympathy for the bullied homosexuals of the past. As well they should. It's a tired trope to say the past explains the present--and questionable. More often we should look to the present to explain the past.

Our understanding of the past is malleable and obscure, mediated through History. The present is undeniable, in your face. The present is to the past as reality is to its representation.

The present is always and everywhere exposing various misconceptions failing the "test of time"--except where political correctness won't let it happen. The consequences of this suppression are disastrous and getting worse.

"Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraints imposed upon her by the laws of man."
--Alexis de Toqueville

Consider our experience with race relations, where--though no one ever says it--the misbehavior of blacks in the present explains the segregation and oppression of the past. Indeed, it creates a natural and justified longing for it. That each individual white endures a sort of psychological torture by propaganda suppressing this--as our suicide rates climb--is a great crime.

Feminism is, unfortunately, barely getting started on this same arc and is sure--because it's women--to be even less rational the farther we get into their grim enterprise dedicated to making of women inferior men.

Like civil rights and desegregation, gay liberation likewise will reveal the evils of the past weren't irrational expressions of Hate (global evil spirit in Diversity theology) but social and evolutionary adaptations to the problem of homosexuality.

Among those problems is the tendency for homosexuals to form elite subcultures and capture organizations or institutions--like the Catholic Church. Our capture now by gay culture looks very much this historic precedent on a grand, chaotic scale.

This rant was prompted of course by the "Voxadpocalypse". The limp wrist of justice found even me, though it only copped a feel.

A YouTube livestream video from last October was flagged, reviewed and taken down

 

No strike was applied, but the letter ends with the strong suggestion I "review" my videos to avoid getting the boot.
So I just took a scorched earth approach, taking all but the last couple of videos private. The longer your trace of videos the more raw material laid out for the voluntary auxiliary thought police to mine and flag. But You Tube has a plan apparently, that goes all the way down to tiny channels like mine (270 or so subscribers).

We're all supposed to believe this is a result of outrage over Carlos Maza's suffering and YouTube's initial refusal to take down Steven Crowder's channel, but it's yet another case of a platform unleashing a host of restrictions on a questionable pretext. Usually somebody being "bullied" online. The left's obsession with "bullying", its use as a means to power (first come the charges of sexual harassment/racism/bullying, then the remedies, which involve transfer of power, position, wealth) demonstrates the status of gays within it, just as its obsession with sexual harassment demonstrates the status of women there.

No, I think if this is due to a single sissy, he's perched higher up than Carlos Maza.

You Tube is said to be just getting under way in this latest round of repression. After they've eliminated as many right-wing accounts as they can without doing more damage to the platform than they want the remaining few will be severely limited, banned from monetization and recommendations.

And, completely coincidental to this totally unplanned escalation of the purge, comes a piece in the New York Times about a white guy "drawn" from innocuous self-help videos into the "rabbit hole" of alt right You Tube via the site's AI-derived recommendations.

AI must be calibrated to pc premises eventually; the powers-that-be eye the technology warily, greedily. Objectivity has always been their enemy; automated objectivity is a nightmare for them. It's a nightmare for us if they get control of it.

But we're just another sissy's complaint away from the next phase of their plan, I imagine, helpfully outlined in the New York Times article above.

A Purge's Progress

"If you are reading this I'm already dead..." 

Nick Monroe on being banned from Twitter for the Orwellian offense of "ban evasion":

You’re reading this because I’m gone now. Twitter permanently banned me for a “ban evasion” lasting three-and-a-half years.

 They say my account – which amassed almost 50,000 followers and has appeared on numerous news websites – is a “ban evader”. This means I had an old account which was banned, so they banned my new account, too.

Twitter: "If you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts."

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.

Banning people from the platform is inconsistent with allowing fictional personas in the first place. Whatever the case, Twitter doesn't believe in redemption.
Monroe is apologetic about the old account

Being banned on Twitter is a lot like participating in both the court of public opinion and a funeral at the same time. Both my followers and detractors are judging my body of work and all my actions in the wake of the ban. I wasn’t always the person I am today, but who I am was best described in my interview with Michael Malice.
Roughly five years ago, I was ‘PressFartToContinue’ (PFTC).

It's all somber tones and puerile names in the Current Year. Future man won't know what to make of it.

I made a YouTube account by that name when I was 17-years-old. It was meant to be a fan channel of ‘PressHeartToContinue’.

I had no idea what I was doing, or how my actions would come to impact me years later. I, like just about everyone else in the world, have grown since I was 17. And I know who I am today. I’m the independent Twitter journalist who spoke out against online censorship before I too was banned.

And that last part is what this is really all about. Twitter is not scandalized by the thought of enemy of humanity PressFartToContinue evading justice. Ironically, it's the good behavior of Monroe's later account, and its effectiveness as a critique that inspires this action. The ruse is laughable.

Monroe was actually quite disciplined and broke no pc rules--the very model of how to get past the censors, if they were even faking an unbiased stance.

A little too on that adorable nose.
Twitter earlier banned an AOC parody account for being "misleading" despite the author including the word "parody" in the title and bio. The author was then perma-suspended for having a personal account as well, which isn't actually forbidden.

"No, really, Mr. Hanson, my intention was just to bring shame upon her and her family..."
Meanwhile Dateline NBC still hasn't come around for Gawker's Josh Bernstein for stalking a 14 year-old girl. One thing I didn't know about the Soph saga is the police were actually called in after his hit-piece:

According to the local Kron4 new station, they published a piece on May 17th, 2019 indicating that police are investigating Soph based on complaints made by those at her school, who have begun shunning the teenager and claiming that what she stated in her “Be Not Afraid” video was “disgusting”. The video was taken down by YouTube shortly after the Buzzfeed article was published...

The Daily Beast punches up at a barely-employed sports blogger:

On May 22, a Donald Trump superfan and occasional sports blogger from the Bronx named Shawn Brooks posted a video clip of Nancy Pelosi on his personal Facebook page. The clip showed Pelosi at her most excitable, stammering during a press conference as she voiced frustration over an abortive infrastructure meeting with the president. Brooks’ commentary on the video was succinct: “Is Pelosi drunk?” 

Thirteen minutes later, a Facebook official told The Daily Beast, Brooks posted a very different Pelosi video to a Facebook page called Politics WatchDog—one of a series of hyperpartisan news operations Brooks runs (with help, he claims). This clip had been altered to slow Pelosi down without lowering the pitch of her voice. The effect was to make it sound as though the Speaker of the House was slurring her words drunkenly while criticizing Donald Trump. 

Fifteen minutes after that, the same doctored video appeared on a second Facebook page Brooks manages, AllNews 24/7. This clip was identical to the Politics WatchDog video on every way, except that it didn’t carry the Politics WatchDog branding that was superimposed over the earlier video. Whoever posted it had access to the director’s cut. On both pages the clip was accompanied by the exact same dispassionate, newsy prose: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Trump walking out infrastructure meeting: ‘It was very, very, very strange.’”

At the same time, doctoring that video was wrong. I'll chalk it up to the fact Brooks is a black guy. His defenders sure seem fixated on that.

Again this is all about trying to prevent a Trump victory in 2020. But it's also a global trend. Angela Merkel's chosen successor has proposed censoring dissidents ahead of elections:

Merkel's successor sparks freedom of speech uproarPicture: Die WeltSofia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's favoured successor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer sparked outrage on social media on Tuesday with an apparent call for limits to free speech around elections, AFP reported. 

The CDU chief's comment came after her party and its centre-left coalition partner SPD suffered their worst scores in Sunday's European election -- a result partly blamed on the fact that some 70 YouTube stars had urged Germans not to vote for either party.

Addressing the issue on Monday night, Kramp-Karrenbauer said if 70 newspaper editors had called to boycott parties ahead of an election, that would be classed "clearly as propaganda". 

"The question is... what are rules from the analogue realm and which rules should apply to the digital realm?

"I'll tackle this discussion quite aggressively," said Kramp-Karrenbauer, or AKK as she is dubbed in Germany.

The pace quickens.

Place That Quote: Hitler or the Pope?

Even a fool can be profound taken out of context:

"If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he holds out, doesn't it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them?"

"He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans." 

That's the Pope inveighing against populism, somehow, on behalf of progressive secular globalism. This could have been one of the more insightful passages in Mein Kampf.

It's testament to globalism's power the Church won't touch right-wing populism with a ten-foot crosier. Despite right-wing populism being its natural ally against degeneracy, abortion, war; despite it being the last defender of religion and the status of the Church, for the love of you know Who!

 What a strange world.

Late Night Nostalgia

I've long been a fan of electronic music. One of the first dj/producer auteurs to capture my fancy was Jack Dangers, who records with a rotating collective of fellow artists under the unfortunate name Meat Beat Manifesto.
The name is not a reference to masturbation (at least directly) but to militant veganism and animal rights. A Brit based in San Francisco, Dangers was a practical parody of the progressive.
And the music was infused with his philosophy; I recall a track sampling the sounds of the slaughterhouse.

Despite this the music never comes across as strident. Dangers could be just that in interviews--you could picture even the typical music journalist interviewer rolling his eyes. I recall reading an interview with another artist associated with him and very much of the same progressive stripe, which was the opposite--he came across reasonable and relaxed. Unlike his music, which was embarrassingly forthright.

But Jack was just too good somehow for his politics to ruin his music, even when the music was political.

I was practically a Reagan conservative twenty years ago when I heard this track, Asbestos Lead Asbestos, but even then and still now I see it as a powerful image of an exploited working class toiling away in the midst of decadence, and of the elite disdain for the working class that is such an exigent feature of the present:

I can't hear you. [sample]
What in the hell happened?[sample]
Information. [sample]
What's wrong? [sample]
Well he might say yes but he might mean no.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
Sell him the coffee table - go boy, go.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
It's chip board quality, easy installment scheme.
Lead Asbestos
And Dave lives above the roundabout, nobody told him different.
He blows out dust behind the caravan.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
If they're lucky they'll get pearly white teeth...
Times are hard and the kids ain't learning a thing.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos
Except stealing and fighting.
Asbestos Lead Asbestos 
So they offer him a salary...
National health and a pension scheme...
So he can lie in his bed while he bleeds to death...
So we hand them rich women coffee party handouts
Fill it for the sick, 'cause someone's gotta' eat it...
And it won't be us because we're the smart ones....
Mode of every public school we live on the west side.
Lead Asbestos
Equal opportunity, except if our pedigree dogs don't like the smell of your children...
They're stealing and fighting, but we live on the west side.

"Someone's got to eat it [contaminated food] and it won't be us because we're the smart ones" strikes home more than ever.

 

His stuff went off in a jazz-influenced direction and he lost me.

Here's a good example of his use of non-musical sampling (lots of stuff from documentaries and television--the stridently anti-TV Dangers spent hours in front of the television ready to record). Much of what he does are polemics against modernity in the nature of Ted Kazynski.



His 1999 album Satyricon presented a portrait of fin de seicle decline like the fragmentary Latin satire that is its namesake (the Satyr of the given title doesn't refer to its satirical quality, I think, but to the decadence it documents), and remains, to my mind, one of the best albums of all time.

Non-musical sampling appears to be a lost or at least played-out aspect of music, but the "found sounds" and other samples here give the record a profound depth, humor and satirical quality.

It was all about global warming, fascism and standard progressive bugaboos, but the work transcends its own content by virtue of the vague nature of sampling. Jack wanted to connect his environmental and anti-fascist concerns, probably still does, but the reality is globalism (capitalism) and authoritarianism are in fact going hand-in-hand, and do trace back to what he, in his political simplicity and artistic romanticism, called out by another name.

Time  has come round and overtaken even the author, and that speaks well of him.

My personal theory (or maybe I read it from someone else) is that a work of art takes on its own life once released, and meaning is not set in authorial intent. That doesn't mean a work that escapes, so to speak, its author any less an accomplishment--maybe it's all the more an achievement. The artist has unearthed things beyond immediate understanding and the trite context of the present, evoking principal forms and eternal truths.



Dangers did a lot of production work for well-known (but to my mind lesser) artists such as Nine Inch Nails and Public Enemy. His track Prime Audio Soup was featured in the first Matrix film and the first track above was on the Blair Witch soundtrack.

Goodnight.

Chillstream, 12/9/18: So Much Losing

My YouTube channel.

Plundering for Justice

We're in the redress and appropriation phase of the civil rights movement, wherein the wealth and culture created by history's putative monsters, white Americans, is being redistributed among non-whites.

The tenets of the post-religious dispensation are Equality and Diversity. Together they posit a natural order, lost to white supremacy, wherein material wealth and power are equally distributed among a peaceful, racially diverse population, and between men and women. If not for white racism and patriarchy this natural order would take hold and humanity would (will) be saved.

The left is so far gone now it's suggesting this Utopia did in fact exist (Britain was always diverse, Beethoven was black, etc). It's patent nonsense, but these tenets hold. We can fully expect leftist historical retconning like this in the future on behalf of transsexuals.

These tenets imply economic commandments: go forth and make right white pilferage of black (for one) American wealth. Thus we have an economic growth industry that can masquerade as social justice, as the clever and cynical (or delusional, doesn't matter) are encouraged to create new ways to effect that transfer of wealth out of white hands.

Team Diversity is the global mafia, and everywhere the Narrative wants its cut, from film roles to the "resources" being denied blacks by selfish whites retreating to the suburbs--loot and pussy foremost, judging from our long sorry experience with integration.

Meanwhile non-whites seem to be divided between the cynical and those who genuinely believe the con--that they're only taking what's rightfully theirs somehow.

The lefty journalist and/or activist now is like a pirate granted sanction by the religious order to go forth and plunder. The hobbyists of what Steve Sailer calls the voluntary auxiliary thought police are akin to crusaders, promised absolution and crashing through the countryside leaving a wake of ruin behind.

As a game black civil rights is rigged, because we can't consider black outcomes have any connection to black people. The extent of the ruin they inflict on the whole as a result of criminality and sloth becomes the measure of our guilt.

As there's money in this game, this means black dysfunction is a cash cow. For a long time of course it's been a way to extract wealth from the whole through social programs. Despite being large, this is a boring  business, akin to retail banking. The civil rights industry is moving into more creative revenue streams now.

The Washington Post, "How White Racism Destroys White Wealth":

There are a lot of reasons that home prices tend to be lower in black neighborhoods than in white ones. Decades of racist policies put in place by governments and private companies — segregation, redlining, deed restrictions, exclusionary zoning, the deliberate hollowing out of urban cores — have had the net effect of eroding the quality of life in many majority-black neighborhoods nationwide.

As the authors of a new Brookings Institution-Gallup study note, Zillow data shows that the median listing price of a home in a majority-black neighborhood in a major metro area is around $184,000, while the median listing in a neighborhood where blacks make up less than 1 percent of the population stands at over $341,000. 

The violent ethnic cleansing of white urban America allowed blacks to take over some of the nation's best real estate. That first great pillaging didn't lead to Detroit becoming Wakanda, but becoming Detroit. Now we're expected to pay at the other end for the fleecing.

Another way of looking at this is a measure of the extent blacks destroy real estate values. There is a cost, it just flips either way depending on whether or not you believe the Narrative. The real cost is likely huge, but we'll never be allowed to consider it at this rate: the opportunity cost of losing major cities to black pogroms, necessitating the suburbs and still all manner of adjustment to accommodate black malice.

But the raiders aren't letting up--they have the hard ground of religious sanction, the Narrative, under their feet.
They're putting prices on stuff now:

They wanted to isolate the effects of racism alone — to peel off all the other explanatory variables until they could “detect how much racism depletes wealth from black homeowners,” as they put it. In the end, they were left with one number: $48,000. 

That’s the amount the average home in a majority-black neighborhood is undervalued, relative to an identical home in an identical all-white neighborhood once you properly adjust for all the other structural and neighborhood characteristics that could plausibly affect that number. That’s the “cost of racial bias,” as the authors put it, “amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses” accruing to black homeowners.

There was a bit in the old National Lampoon magazine about black reparations, wherein white America consents to reparations but then presents black America with a bill for charges against those reparations, tallying up everything from the Club auto theft device to penis enlargement operations.

Meanwhile, the authors of the "study":

“If we can detect how much racism depletes wealth from black homeowners, we can begin to address bigotry principally by giving black homeowners and policymakers a target price for redress,”

Feeling down, black America? Call your doctor and ask about Reparations!

“Laws have changed, but the value of assets — buildings, schools, leadership, and land itself — are inextricably linked to the perceptions of black people. And those negative perceptions persist.”

The stones themselves are imbued with our racism.

Suicide Watch

The old joke Washington Post headline, "Meteor to Obliterate Earth, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit" works because it's a fair description of a well worn media template, getting more worn by the day in our Current Year of Salon-Vox-Slate thumb-suckers: "social effect x occurs, protected class(es) disproportionately affected".

There's always been an unacknowledged concomitant to this model--a once implicit now explicit stricture: there are no particular white concerns or needs, there is only "privilege". Indeed, whites faring better than the norm on any given metric is always evidence of privilege, not agency or virtue. The joke could just as well have been "Meteor to Obliterate Earth,  Whites Least Affected".

When researchers first started reporting evidence of rising mortality in white America they were pilloried for concerning themselves with white health. One common response to its mention (see Salon-Vox-Slate) is to note whites are still ahead of blacks and browns in wealth and health. If you buy into blank-slate notions you see this as a straight measure of "privilege"; if you buy into common sense you see this as the measure of ruin left in the nation.

Whites have lost the ability to see the crime in this because we've been stripped of the concept of "us" by the reigning cultural order. The dying off of white Americans is a direct result of the same culture that suppresses its notice, much less analysis or address as such. Like rising mortality in a wealthy society, this is without historical precedent, a people unable to see themselves as such--at least one not physically conquered.

The Wall Street Journal

Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.

Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.

Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.

“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”  

The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations... 

White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.

Black men continue to lead in mortality (suffered and dealt), ironically enough (and this is just my racist opinion) by living it up, via a thriving hip hop culture--which is part and parcel of the broader culture in which whites are not thriving.

Elite whites would do well to drop their hostility to white identity--just as declining morals infect a population by welling from the bottom up, so will their consequences.

Scratch an SJW...

It played out like countless controversies: offense is taken, racism is charged, social media is mobilized, capitulation is achieved. Only this one played out in China:

Dolce Gabbana has postponed a catwalk show in Shanghai after an outcry over racially offensive posts on its Instagram account that the fashion brand has claimed were written by hackers. 

The controversy arose after the Italian fashion brand published a video on the Chinese social media site Weibo on Monday showing a Chinese model using chopsticks to try to eat a pizza, a cannoli and spaghetti. 

Weibo users accused the label of trivialising China’s culture and depicting Chinese women in a racist way. The video was taken down within 24 hours but it had already been shared widely on social media, where the hashtag #BoycottDolce began to circulate.

The accusations of racism and racial stereotyping intensified after what appeared to be an Instagram direct message conversation between Stefano Gabbana and the fashion writer Michaela Phuong was shared by Diet Prada, an Instagram account known for criticising the fashion industry.

American Renaissance subtitled their excerpt of the story: "China’s social justice warriors are as thin-skinned as America’s" but, as their comments section immediately noted, no. Not at all.
These are social justice tactics, but the warriors are nationalists.

If there is a social justice warrior contingent in China worthy of the name they are indifferent to or approving of an offense given to Han Chinese--they would have been more likely to take offense on behalf of Italians.

Thin-skinned the offended are, but out of the excess pride of an ascendant and confident nation. I suspect they are not snowflakes, either. What's relatively new here is their adoption of the social justice logic and tactics cultivated by our own anti-nationalists on the left. As long as social justice reigns in the West its adversaries will take advantage of it, and we can probably expect more, not less, of this.

It isn't new; Russian (and other) "hackers" seek out the divisions created by diversity and exploit them:

Many of the tactics that Russia experiments with could (and likely will) be enacted on a much larger scale two years from now [2020]. Some of these strategies and maneuvers appear grounded in reality, while others seem speculative, but all have the same sinister goal of breaking the system—by cleaving our polity, distracting us with feuds large and small—by sowing discord through technology platforms and services. 

“Having the U.S. at war with itself is giving Russia credit internationally,” explained Andrew Weiss, the vice president for research on Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that we as a country are more divided on almost every issue than at any other time in history. “[Russia is] not the creator of this problem, but they have exploited it. Just creating mistrust, and throwing a question mark over the legitimacy of our government, is a pretty big prize for Russia.” 

Another distinction is made obsolete. The divide is between those who advocate on behalf of their own--whether via identity politics in the West or openly as ethnic nationalists--and those who don't--white "social justice warriors", who march shoulder-to-shoulder with these ethnic nationalists chanting the same slogans.

If I was China I'd look for ways to co-opt Asian activists and grievance in the West. Because, after all, there is no difference between the offense a Chinese patriot and an American-born Chinese take at such as the Dolce & Gabbana ad. The latter doesn't even attempt any more to clad his ethnic pride in social justice scales: no, he'll tell you he defends a proud, superior even, people and culture.

The legal and cultural structure set up by social justice is ready-made for the final looting of the American economic and cultural legacy, which seems to be well under way. China and other countries can be expected to merge with their minority US populations politically and culturally, as they are working hard to do now.

Global ethnic communities operating under cover of globalism is one very possible future. Cheerio.

Mind the Gapped

The nation is so cowed by political correctness controversy isn't what it used to be.
When I heard a city councilman somewhere had used the phrase "master race" my morbid self rose to the clickbait, expecting to learn some poor soul went off-matrix and starting ranting about race and all that entails.

But no, it turns out "master race" is a phrase, like "nigger", that not only offends when used in earnest, it can't be uttered in context, and certainly not in jest.
Political correctness expanded beyond barring the (ever growing realm of) offensive to things that remind one of the offensive at some point. Now we can't even be trusted with our own language, uttering child-like constructs such as "the N-word". That this is the ineffable name of our time, like Yahweh, shows you who sits atop the hierarchy of grievance that is our quasi-religious order now.

Turns out the controversy was over a councilman making a joke about the concept of "master race" in front of a black woman, with whom he actually shared an affinity

 “I don’t want you to think I am picking on you because we are part of the master race,” Klemp told Penelton. “You have a gap in your teeth. We are part of the master race. Don’t you forget that.”
Klemp, chairman of the three-member commission, also has a gap in his teeth. Fellow commissioners Robert Holland and Doug Smith have also called for Klemp to leave.

We in the gap-toothed community were not consulted.

White Women Wantonly Whiting

Via Steve Sailer, the Twitter account for feminist advocacy group "Women's March":

"White women gonna white" appears to be a theme. From the organization's website:

We are outraged. We are organized. They forgot that 5 million women lit the world on fire two years ago. On January 19, 2019, we’re going to remind them when we flood the streets of Washington, D.C., and with sister marches in cities across the globe. Save the date: The #WomensWave is coming, and we’re sweeping the world forward with us.

Fire and flood. Sweeping the world forward on a wave of menopausal discharge. You can pretend to notice nothing (not noticing things is a Current Year survival skill we have all developed--without noticing) but the imagery is unavoidable.
I'm reminded of another unintentionally sinister slogan (sorry ladies, the logo is taken):

Cover the earth grrrls.

A google search for "white women" of course turns up more of the same. White women are letting the side down, perpetually:

Twitter:

Objectification

Self-objectification distinguishes us from our forebears. You might say we're in an era of hyper-self-objectification (someone probably has). Social media gives anyone the opportunity to package and broadcast oneself as a crafted image, to imagine themselves as a work of art.

Popular makeup and hair for women has gone from the attempt to fake youth to unmasked artifice--it doesn't matter if you notice it; you're supposed to notice it and it's supposed to convey a message--not about sexual availability entirely or even mostly but about identity, signalling aspirational class and aesthetic sensibility, philosophical, even political affiliation--blue hair.

The average woman long ago adopted open sexual objectification, what used to be reserved for the disreputable (it is said lipstick originated among ancient Egyptian prostitutes, not to recreate youthful lips but to mimic the vagina and advertising fellatio), again, as distinct from its role in enhancing sexual attractiveness.

Broadly the trend toward popular self-objectification it goes well beyond sexual signalling, is often asexual or even ironic, parodying sexuality or sexual vigor.

What remains is the vanity, the vanity of the individual indulging the experience of objectification, which is not necessarily dehumanizing, or, the fact is "dehumanization", literally interpreted, isn't necessarily unpleasant. The high-concept fashion adopted by the serious (or obsessive) self-objectifier is an attempt to transcend physicality and biology, to de-humanize.

I thought to contrast "dehumanization" with "commodification", with the latter as a negative, but it occurs to me it that people are enthusiastically commodifying themselves, and in a wold of money worship the only concern is to be too cheaply priced a commodity--which doesn't mean people aren't selling themselves cheap. Self-commodification, quite literally, is widespread. Online an attractive woman can package and sell her image to men she never has to see. She's taken the sex out of prostitution; indeed, she seems to have transferred the degradation in the sexual transaction to the John, who is legion, anonymous and sexually frustrated.

Nobody is supposed to believe the thick eyebrows presently in vogue; they're taken up like a style of dress, off the rack. Likewise sexually enticing but outlandish effects--thick eyeliner framing rather than accentuating the eyes, ridiculously long lashes; sharp-angled effects in hair and makeup mimic the mechanical, the designed object or, I like to think, the palette, which is how the individual sees himself.

The world champion objectifiers of women are of course drag performers. Naturally the trans movement, which seeks a political identity for pathological self-objectifiers, places them in the forefront. The feminists are right about one thing: men tend to objectify more than women. What they won't or can't see is that, naturally, women seek out this very objectification--and who do they go to? Gay aesthetes. Men. No one objectifies women more than fashion designers.

The enthusiastic adoption of objectification is changing the way we live. Now the humblest specimen can find someone who will objectify her--and it is far more often her. Notable however how many men seek it now too--trans men are the biggest self-objectification whores on the planet, turning the same masculine tendency toward objectification upon themselves, belying the feminist notion it's inherently degrading. It is the highest honor.

That doesn't mean it doesn't cause trouble for women. It's dangerous. To be honored in this way can be fatal. The feminists are wrong here as they are everywhere else primarily in assigning to biologically-determined human behavior a socially constructed origin. As if the guys decided to play this trick on them one day--but of course the whole silly idea of a "patriarchy" existing as a social construct or pathology has this problem of origins. Patriarchy was born of primitive necessity, a necessity we haven't really shed, despite conventional wisdom.

The way women live now contradicts feminist theory identifying the objectification of women with misogyny.

Women seek out objectification--and they aren't alone. The profusion of self-objectification through media is human nature meeting the open-ended indulgence of capitalist technology. Indulging vanity is Who We Are now.

Media v Media

Google's Perspective algorithm is a tool for censoring "toxic" speech based on word combinations that isn't effective enough for censorship proponents. (Who come mostly from media. Oliver Darcy's efforts on CNN were crucial to the campaign to ban Alex Jones. They should just give him the Pulitzer. Come on, msm, you know you want to.) Cable news, formerly more prestigious outlets such as the Atlantic, and of course the Huffpo-sphere all contribute to the campaign prodding the social media companies toward ever more de-platforming and censorship. Tech media provides creative technical advise.

The near future of censorship will focus on individuals and their ability to associate. Taking out Jones isn't just about silencing him, but also about taking out a node of transmission, by which the curious find their way to more serious and ultimately, to the Narrative, damaging content. From the severely progressive site Rantt

Google’s new Perspective algorithm is a good start, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle we can’t solve with the data points from a single comment, even with the most well trained recurrent neural networks. Ultimately, we need to teach computers to follow a conversation and make an informed opinion of a person’s character, something that can’t be done by a single neural net heavily reliant on parsing language.

It's not the character of the content but the content of your character

Understanding how to do it may be one of the most important technical issues we tackle, or lose the web to armies of trolls, bots, and people really into goose-stepping to a strongman’s tune.

Social media executives, down with the cause but retaining sympathy for the bottom line, are pressured from within as well. Their ranks are rotten with progressives clamoring for more censorship, like cops who resent not being able to bust heads:

Tech companies succeed or fail based on the talent of their developers, which gives those workers the leverage to shape the company culture. So when your engineers tell you there's a problem, you listen. That was clear again this week when Twitter engineers took to the site to push back against CEO Jack Dorsey's comments about why notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is still on the platform when other tech companies have banished him. 

Dorsey responded to his engineers publicly, thanking them for their thoughts and pledging to do better... 

The pressure on Twitter to ban Jones from its platform grew exponentially this week, though, after other major companies like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube started taking action against him for violating their terms of service. On Tuesday, Dorsey tweeted, “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.” 

Dorsey further explained that Twitter couldn’t ban Jones based on “succumbing to outside pressure,” and he called on journalists to continue to fact-check him. This didn’t go over well with journalists—many pointed out that we spend a lot of time fact-checking nonsense, but that it’s not our job to keep a viral disinformation incubator healthy;

spit take 

it’s our job to report facts. The defense also fell flat with some current and former Twitter employees. “There is no honor in resisting ‘outside pressure’ just to pat ourselves on the back for being ‘impartial,’" 

Jack, the call is coming from inside the house...! 

Twitter engineer Marina Zhao tweeted. "I agree with @ekp that Twitter does not exist in a vacuum, and it is wrong to ignore the serious real-world harm, and to equate that with political viewpoints.” @ekp is Ellen Pao, formerly of Twitter and Reddit, who had earlier replied to Dorsey, “We tried treating @reddit as a silo, and it was a huge mistake. People got harassed cross-platform. Also if your site is the only one that allows this hate and harassment, it will get overrun and collapse.”

In the end taking Jones out might be the best thing for the right. The left is defusing a bomb that's already gone off, and if Jones disappears entirely, he takes with him a reputation for crazy that is no longer applied to the right. And in all likelihood the deplatforming of Jones will work as intended.

Here's Motherboard:

“We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

The sad fact is someone like Jones has nothing other than his platform--his voice. Emphasis added:

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. Nor are we talking about people from marginalized communities who have self-censored or left social media because of far right harassment and hate campaigns (and could, in theory, come back with more proactive moderation by large platforms.)

I say the author's self conscious, he'd say thorough, but following "we're crushing the powerless" with "but not the real powerless" is comic gold. Thank you, social justice man. Who, whom all the way down.

Once they've purged the net to the extent possible, expect to be hounded right into the dark web weeds:

Nonetheless, the concern among academics is that, as hate moves to the darker corners of the internet, that some of their old followers may move with them and become further radicalized. “The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.” The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers.

The work of social justice never ends, or, it ends at the barrel of a gun.

Sunday

On Luke Ford today with Collin Liddell and Matt Forney.

Robert Stark and Matt P of Stark Truth TV join in to talk about their documentary (((Supply))) featuring Luke:

Hegemony and Harmony

Jack Beatty writes in Age of Betrayal:

...capitalism was up for debate in Gilded Age America; it had not achieved "cultural hegemony," a concept introduced by the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci to elucidate how regimes rule without force. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is "the 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the  population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production."

"Cultural hegemony" is a useful concept, if we strip away the postmodern autism--what's remarkable about a "dominant fundamental group" establishing norms? Is there a place where this isn't in effect?
Nonetheless, it exists, and it's useful to know exactly who wields it and how.

Gramsci the revolutionary invokes it to pathologize the capitalist order he seeks to overthrow. In the process he gives us a fine example of what Noam Chomsky said of post-structuralist theory, that it's all over-complicated truisms. Truisms, I would add, purporting to expose distortions in an implied natural order that doesn't exist.

But cultural hegemony is real. It's inevitable. Isn't the real question who wields it?

The old Wasp elite may have held their poor relations in some contempt, but they recognized them as relations. They would be stingy, they would be exploitative even, but they would not cut them loose, out of noblesse oblige.
Those commanding cultural hegemony now have no connections to the mass, and of course many feel hostility toward it. They are either indifferent to or enthusiastic about cutting them loose.

As ruling elites go historically, they weren't a severe as they look to our Current Year degenerate eyes. But the Wasps aren't in charge any more, not as Wasps at least, having been displaced by the Jews, who determine the course of society by virtue of the "prestige" they've earned through their "position and function in the world of production".

Cultural hegemony is complicated and souped-up now by technology. The old means of transmission was the church, the school, the intact pre sexual revolution family. The "hegemony" was traditional and orderly; oppressive but pacific.

The new hegemony defines itself as opposed to the old order, disdains pacifism and is just as oppressive, in its way. The hostility and dysfunction Grasmsci saw through Marxian goggles in the old cultural hegemony is now here in reality--and money is still fundamental. And Gramsci's radicalism helped, playing its part in discrediting the old order.

The globalist elite, having co-opted Marxism and folded it into capitalism by way of--yes--cultural hegemony are quite adept, if not as confident any more, of squeezing "spontaneous" consent, even enthusiasm, out of the masses, for a social direction no one would have acquiesced to, if they'd been asked. Gramsci had no idea. He must be rolling, leftward, in his grave.

Predator, Prey

None other than the New York Times has exposed, it would seem, the hypocrisy of early #MeToo leader Asia Argento. Only now I learn her struggle: she was compelled to fake orgasm to get Harvey Weinstein's face out of her vagina, just like Rose McGowan before her, except Argento maintained a consensual sexual relationship with Weinstein for years afterward. When she saw McGowan building a career and heroic identity out of enduring precisely the same thing and calling it rape (who knew?) she wasted no time reacquainting herself with her trauma.

Her accuser's story is about as un-harrowing as her tale of Weinstein (presumably he didn't have to fake his orgasms, but I'm not sure how that affects the balance), and the belated timing of his sexual trauma is as suspect as hers--she suddenly discovered her victimhood after Rose McGowan made it profitable; a month later, he discovered his, which she had just made profitable. A Hollywood hypocrisy cascade.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight. 

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18... 

The fallout from “a sexual battery” was so traumatic that it hindered Mr. Bennett’s work and income and threatened his mental health, according to a notice of intent to sue that his lawyer sent in November to Richard Hofstetter, [Anthony] Bourdain’s longtime lawyer, who was also representing Ms. Argento at the time.

Bourdain killed himself after being cuckolded by Argento, who was photographed cavorting with a younger, shinier supportive male--a journalist she met through the #MeToo movement.

A more cynical person would see Argento (daughter of Italian horror movie director Dario Argento) as adept at getting what she wants from men, and as comfortable trading career capital for sex as with trading sex for career capital. Morally there's no distinction--unless we're allowed to consider young women are more vulnerable than young men here, which we aren't. But I'm sure the sex is a lot better when you're on top, so to speak, whoever you are.

Leah McSweeney in Penthouse, under the title Toxic Femininity:

Born in Rome, Asia Argento was raised in a family of famous Italian artists. Her father, Dario Argento, is a director and screenwriter best known for his innovative and influential horror movies. Her mother is the actress Daria Nicolodi, who starred in several of her husband’s films. Beyond this, Argento has a lineage of family members who were musicians and composers, including her maternal grandfather, Alfredo Casella.

Ms Argento didn't land in Hollywood off a Greyhound bus. Which makes me wonder: where are the stories of naive girls arriving in Hollywood to be taken advantage of who don't go on to have careers? All the prominent and not-so-prominent actresses with tales of lechery seem to have made careers for themselves--that are winding down due to age or stalled, and they've all come forward after the coast was made clear by two clearly mendacious characters, Rose McGowan and Asia Argento.

On October 10th of last year, journalist Ronan Farrow published a bombshell New Yorker article in which 13 women made allegations against Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, sharing accounts not only of sexual misconduct and harassment, but also rape.  

Credited with initiating the contemporary #MeToo movement, the article detailed what it called Argento’s “rape” experience with Weinstein, one very similar to Rose McGowan’s own experience with the producer. Wrote Farrow: “Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, said that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her.” Argento went on to tell Farrow, “I know he has crushed a lot of people before. That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.” 

...Argento and McGowan describe Weinstein giving them oral sex, and both say they faked an orgasm in hopes of getting the experience over with as fast as possible... 

Argento went on to have a consensual relationship with Weinstein for several years. The New Yorker article is what thrust the Italian actress into America’s cultural conversation. Before this, the American media knew little about her.

Sometime after Argento and Weinstein were done with their totally non-transactional relationship the aging actress happened to Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain met Argento on the set of his wildly popular CNN show Parts Unknown when he was filming in Rome. Argento, a single mother of two and Italian celebrity, ended up a guest on the show. In February 2017, not long after they met on camera, the New York Post confirmed the two had started dating. One quick scroll through the couple’s individual social media accounts reveals that Bourdain was completely smitten with Argento, posting photos of her on the regular with heartwarming comments.

Bagging Weinstein and then, in her sexual decline, Bourdain, suggests as a sexual adventuress Argento has been very successful. An old Saturday Night Live bit featured a South American baseball star whose limited English led him to answer every interview question with "Bas-e-ball has been berry, berry good to me"; when asked about his big new contract he says it with more emphasis "...berry, berry good...". The Hollywood sexual market has been berry berry good to Asia Argento. It probably was pretty good to Rose McGowan until it wasn't anymore, and #MeToo is likely more about that than anything else.

Taking their participation in that market and selling it now in a different market, as something else, makes this the political-social equivalent of dodgy financial practices like mortgage-backed securities full of bad loans. The clearly deranged McGowan et al are the moral Goldman Sachs of Hollywood, making money at both ends of the deal. Is there likewise a political-social bubble? How does that end?

Bourdain was openly supportive of Argento’s involvement in the #MeToo movement as she rose to be one of its most prominent and vocal crusaders. Bourdain never held back when standing up for her or any part of the #MeToo movement, even defending McGowan and her feminist activism. The #MeToo movement had accrued a strong new male ally in Bourdain...

Bourdain gushed publicly over Argento, and when it came to her career, he was her biggest supporter. This is what you do when you love someone and believe in them. He wanted her to succeed because he adored her. His influence led to her new role as a judge on the Italian version of X-Factor, and he hired her to direct an episode of Parts Unknown when the series filmed in Hong Kong...

But in the days leading up to his suicide, things between the couple seemed to get rocky.
On June 5th, three days before Bourdain’s suicide, paparazzi photos of Argento and the young French reporter Clément, 28, were published in the Italian gossip magazine Chi. The photos showed the two holding hands, kissing, hugging, and dancing in a bar in Rome.

Argento fought to have the photographs pulled. Bourdain was mysteriously no longer following his girlfriend on Instagram. Argento then posted an Instagram story of herself in a Sid Vicious shirt that said Fuck Everyone, and captioned the image: “You know who you are.” Three hours later he killed himself. And she deleted the image off of her instagram story.

Bourdain not only had to endure his public cuckolding by a younger man but the financial shakedown from the jailbait. But there would be no respite in death. The apparent cruelty of her behavior was an immediate problem for brand #MeToo. His still warm body would be thrown under the bus by McGowan on behalf of Argento, too grief-stricken to hoist it, I presume

As numerous eloquent tributes to Bourdain were published, Argento decided she was too grief-stricken to continue speaking publicly, and handed the torch to Rose McGowan. The former Charmed star penned a letter to the public on behalf of Argento, which McGowan’s publicist, Nathaniel Baruch at Brigade Marketing, promptly emailed to Rolling Stone. 

McGowan’s letter opens by saying Argento is now a victim not only of rape but of suicide. “Sitting across from me,” she writes, “is the remarkable human and brave survivor, Asia Argento, who has been through more than most could stand, and yet stand she does. She stood up to her monster rapist and now she has to stand up to yet another monster, suicide. The suicide of her beloved lover and ally, Anthony Bourdain. I write these truths because I have been asked to.” 

You know how to tell if someone is a flake? They use weird, unnecessary phrases like "these truths".

McGowan then discusses Bourdain and Argento’s alleged “open relationship” in an obvious attempt to justify the photos with Clément. It’s too bad Bourdain isn’t here to confirm her statement that he and Argento were “free birds” who “loved without borders.” 

McGowan reminds the reader to “NOT do the sexist thing and burn a woman on the pyre of misplaced blame,” and then says that Bourdain allegedly reached out to a doctor for help with his depression but did not take his advice. (How the fuck she knows that information and why she chose to disclose it remains a big fat question mark.) 

McGowan also states that both Argento and Bourdain suffered from depression, but “she did the work to get help, so she could stay alive and live another day for her and her children,” while Bourdain’s depression usurped him. “His decision, not hers,” McGowan writes. “His depression won.”

Bourdain's battered corpse was actually thrown under the bus a second time--Argento is saying he advised the payoff, implying she might not have. I wouldn't be surprised if Bourdain, whose lawyer handled the scandal for her, paid that hush money.

These women are monsters. Bourdain left an 11 year old daughter and estranged wife who were notably silent during this humiliation--ironic, considering all the mileage #MeToo has gotten out of the idea of "silent" female victims.

Chillstream

Aimless chat with Kaiter Enless, Babylonian Hebrew, ecce lux and Brundlefly.

The Alt Right is Dead; Long Live the Alt Right

This Atlantic piece by Adam Serwer, "White Nationalists are Winning", is a torrent of paranoid hyperbole from the bugman's id, but gets the important part right.

A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!,” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tells his audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.”

This was written before today's own goal for the anti-American left, turning a failed rally of twenty people into a story of deluded thousands chasing imaginary Nazis. Some of Jason Kessler's critics on the right predicted a turnout of a few dozen "losers" resulting in humiliation for the right. They got the first part right, at least, but misidentified the losers. It's as if no one is in charge on the left, ultimately. Whatever constitutes the leadership of the left right now is riding the whirlwind of demagogy it's conjured. The irony just keeps coming--the alt right was felled in Charlottesville because of a failure of leadership, or so we're told.

Whatever becomes of the alt right it will have effected a shift in the Overton Window that could make the difference in the end.

But the alt-right and its fellow travelers were never going to be able to assemble a mass movement. Despite the controversy over the rally and its bloody aftermath, the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda. As long as that agenda finds a home in one of the two major American political parties, a significant portion of the country will fervently support it. And as an ideological vanguard, the alt-right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.

The alt right isn't dead, it's metastasizing.

The left took over America by capturing the moral high ground without ever once apologizing for its militants. Radical elements were key to its advance and remain key, as we saw today, to its defense. The right would do well to emulate that. Just as the left holds the Vietnam War and racism make the violence understandable, if not justifiable, likewise the far less violent fringe on the right is a predictable result of the open campaign of displacement against whites.

If the presence of a radical fringe on the right prompts the sort of embarrassing displays the left put on today, policing that fringe is doing for your enemy what they haven't the self control to do for themselves.

For all its concern over what's embarrassing the right forgot the left has no shame.

Real Comedy v Fake Comedy

Political correctness holds sway as no dispensation before, and with nothing more than, well, political correctness; it's both means and end, in a way. The pre-sixties order in America, still Wasp and Christian, could be publicly skewered. Even Lenny Bruce only ran afoul of authorities for obscenity. But I doubt there's been a period in America where the prevailing order was this off-limits to satire.

A lot of very talented people and resources are dedicated now to making a sort of fake satire, when they proceed from politically correct assumptions. Witness a recent, lamentable Jon Hamm video about that darn white something-or-other.

If sanity reigned, you would see a lot more of the sort of stuff Sam Hyde does. This is what it's supposed to look like, for younger people who only came of age in the Age of Poz.


 

In the Event

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff recalls a paid speaking engagement in Medium:

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own. 

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. 

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?

Shock collars are suggested as a solution for that problem.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. ”  

 This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

Or maybe robots to guard the workers and keep them in line. Whatever it takes.

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

The one percent behave as if they have less and less faith in the system they dominate and celebrate. Those who appear to be in control behave as if they know no one is in control. Absent national sovereignty, representative government and a coherent culture the system itself is in control. Rushkoff, who appears to be a liberal who once believed in the democratizing and liberating power of technology, experiences a revelation:

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

 The recurring joke on the HBO show Silicon Valley is every new project will "make the world a better place". Looks like they've given up on the world. Is there a better indicator of the corruption of a system that those most benefiting from it have no real faith in it?

Reality, Sanity and Survival

Wikipedia:

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. The occurrence of cognitive dissonance is a consequence of a person performing an action that contradicts personal beliefs, ideals, and values; and also occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts said beliefs, ideals, and values.

Cognitive dissonance produces psychological stress when and to the extent we're compelled to hold conflicting beliefs. The most common example is objectivity competing with faith. This stress has to be relieved. It's either reconcile or denial. And we practice a lot of both in the Current Year, rationalizing on one hand and looking the other way on the other.

Living in any culture will require some level of cognitive dissonance.

Religious mythology is the most obvious example of compelled belief conflicting with objective reality. Our post-Enlightenment secular-religious order up to the recent past imposed a relatively light load, with Christianity's revealed, non-falsifiable nature and stress on broad moral principle.
Believing in the Resurrection can be cast as the highest delusion, but it intrudes on nothing in the material present. Believing race doesn't exist, sex is fluid and women differ not at all from men are, let's just say, consequential.

Even a purely rational social order would impose dissonance on individual experience, experience being subjective. But in our present state the more objective the individual's perspective the greater the dissonance.

Political correctness requires commensurate levels of cognitive dissonance, imposed by shame, intimidation, impoverishment In European countries with hate speech laws it can be said to be imposed via the barrel of a gun.

But it isn't the dissonance, it's the lie from which it emanates, crackpot-theory rationalizing our deliberate displacement, condemning our past and precluding our future as plain white Americans. This is not about cognitive dissonance. Merely enduring a lie is one thing. When that lie is the means of your destruction...words fail. How did we allow this?

Resistance becomes a duty, then, to at least Do No Harm, and signal no false virtue. The sixties concept of "selling out"--whatever its validity then--has never been more useful than now. There is no sellout greater than selling out your ancestors and grandchildren at the same time. Working for Dow Chemical in the sixties is nothing as compared to working for present-day Disney.

Current Year cognitive dissonance is the sound of our gallows being built.

On the basis of no authority I suggest the only real relief from cognitive dissonance is abandoning the false belief for the true, and I don't think I need any authority to suggest it's at least the best, from an individual therapeutic standpoint. The recovery of a white political identity in the US becomes one and the same with the recovery of the individual white's mental health--with relief from the imposed psychosis that is political correctness.

In resistance, in transgressing an obvious injustice, the individual white reclaims at once some his own and some of his groups' psychological health. This is, dare I say it, spiritual.