Another another another "Another 'Hump Day Shrapnel' Post" post post post.
Collected thoughts for this Wednesday, expressed genealogically rather than in essay form.
Scattershot thoughts presented without rhetorical cohesion is a sign of abject laziness. This I grant you. But since I’m wearing a cast and can barely use my left hand, it’s what I have to offer. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have likely read a good bulk of these mental flakings. But a large number of my subscribers aren’t Twitter users, so this compilation is therefore, in the treacly buzzword of the zeitgeist, inclusive.
And there’s nothing I value more. Save virtually every other thing.
So. Off we go.
First: Was Ancient Greece a hotbed of paradisiacal LGBTQ+ adoption, acceptance, and adulation? Was Plato the Ancient world’s version of Charlize Theron, ready to “fuck up” any intellectual dinosaur not down with the elevation of homosexual desire into a giant raging boner tableau projected in shadow upon a cave wall? No. Of course not. You’re being lied to by activists with credentials who make such arguments. Which is why they seldom show their work — and when they do, they often misrepresent it and rely on your failure to look at their source material with any degree of curiosity.
Shocking, I realize. But then, the modern academy is, in far too many cases, merely a credentialing mill for political activism disguised as scholarship. This cookie-cutter product is then granted elect status as “expert” in the field under discussion, as if being granted a diploma by an anti-intellectual institution somehow magically grants the recipient standing as something other than a newly professional anti-intellectual.
Below is a video laying waste to current pseudo-academic assertions presenting the ancient world — with its supposed embrace of pederasty, or similarly-situated males engaging in the purest form of love! — as one long celebratory homosexual orgy.
To hear Queer activists revise classical history, you’d think the Greeks — and later the Romans — spent all their time engaged in anal, only pausing to write philosophical and medical treatises, drama, epic poetry, or sculpt stone dongs and create painted pottery in those fleeting few moments when they took a break from humping to smoke a Marlboro and clean up the wet spots on the woven linen sheets.
Second: “The most revolutionary act Americans can today engage in is declaring that truth does, in fact, exist, and that they alone don’t get decide it” — me, earlier today.
Sure, some Russian broad once wrote something similar. But not even she could anticipate the successes postmodernist skepticism — with it’s cynical attacks on the world outside human constructs meant to organize it as it truly exists — would prove as successful as it has. After all, the postmodernists were nothing more than disaffected Marxists butthurt over the failure of the proletariat to rise. Such was their hatred for western materialism, however, that they merely repackaged the sophists, using tortured and specialized argot intended to mystify uninitiated readers in order to make the shocking and revolutionary assertion that discourse occurs through language, language is a construct of man, therefore, everything must be born of the construct, which is the only real thing — insofar as it doesn’t rely on an unreachable metaphysical referee to adjudicate Truth — we as the authors of the construct can legitimately examine.
And upon examination — shockingly! — the postmodernists concluded that everything can be reduced to the tension between competing discourses, each of which is an expression of some power arrangement, leaving humanity itself a construct whose agents are merely products of those dynamics, which frame their beliefs in a kind of bleak and permanent determinism.
— Though not the postmodernists themselves, of course. They could tell you, for instance, that margarine is nowhere near as good as butter. They saw through the corporate bullshit!
This is always how it goes with such tendentious thinkers. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the idea behind anti-racism and CRT is that one needs to become critically conscious of race as a precondition of engaging in racial questions, particularly if they wish to see how race and racism are the pervasive and central organizing principles of a society constrained by White Supremacy. That is, they must submit to critical consciousness training, which — happily for them! — just happens to be the specialty of those claiming it as a prerequisite for having any say whatever in, e.g., racial policy that isn’t immediately dismissed as either violent or wrong by virtue of having been developed within the assumptions of white intellectual spaces.
Sadly, rank-and-file blacks can’t fathom all this necessary preparatory work needed to hold a legitimate or useful view on race, except maybe intuitively and accidentally thanks to lived experience. But even that is tainted by the context through which it is so often interpreted.
— Which is why special, magical Negroes like Joy Reid, Dr Rashad Richey, Elie Mystal, Michael Eric Dyson, Ibram X Kendi, Al Sharpton, Patrisse Cullors, Derek Bell, Kimberley Crenshaw, et al — who, by virtue of having succeeded within the dominant meta-narrative of White Supremacy, and in fact, have overcome systemic oppression even in spite of its structural impossibility to overcome — are simply better blacks than those poor uneducated wretches they presume to champion.
I mean, that’s just science.
Third: Attempts by Big Tech to retroactively police “mis-gendering” should convince everyone committed to free expression and free speech law — which things cannot genuinely exist within a “hate speech” paradigm, as I first noted back in 2002 — that today the highest good a free person can engage in is to deny the globalist corporatists this particular coercion.
Pronouns are linguistic referents that, should they not be predetermined and conventionalized based on specific category designations, are linguistically useless, if not treacherous, when interpreted punitively by the left and its Queer gatekeepers. That is, to work conventionally rather than subjectively and atomically, pronouns can not be “fluid” and remain linguistically viable or coherent. Regardless of where you stand on “kindness” or “deference” when using a person’s “preferred pronouns,” you owe it to liberty itself to resist this attempt to compel speech — especially non-conventional and incoherent speech — by a fascist, neo-Marxian movement that is attempting to secure the compulsory hegemony of professed faith. Use pronouns correctly, as shortcuts for Proper nouns that are bifurcated into linguistic gender. Blaspheme against their fundamentalist authoritarian religion.
Because make no mistake: the left will use your compassion and grace against you — and they’ll do so as viciously and thoroughly as they today elevate their own perversions and predilections to fundamental virtues simply by dint of having chosen to adopt those perversions and predilections. Good people like them, you see, can only by definition do things that are good and right. QED! Sophomoric thinking, sure. But effective when combined with mobbish reinforcement and political protection.
Fourth: When the trans flag inevitably adds its 7 billionth stripe, the reductive left will have inadvertently bumbled back into — through the doctrine of intersectionality — the concept of “individuality,” even though they’ll refuse to call it such.
Instead, it’ll be sold as “identity groups of one” that have been written into being by the potentially innumerable intersectional power dynamic frictions experienced by a given cultural inscription (what we may have in less enlightened times called a “person”).
To paraphrase the demonic and debauched Jeffrey Marsh, this only goes in one direction.
As sure as I warned you back in the early 2000s that we’d end up where we are in the culture wars today — directly, in my view, as the result of ceding the locus of meaning to “interpretative communities” at the expense of guarding individual autonomy as the seat of freedom — I’m now certain that the inexorable and ignominious end to this narcissistic cult of victimhood hierarchy compelled through the Cultural Marxist project will come about when every last potential node of oppression is found in the perfect constructed identity of an intersectional Singularity — equating the highest elevation of grace in leftist identity politics with the absolute apotheosis of what it means to be an individual.
It’s just a shame we had to waste so much time and ruin so many lives following blind — albeit newly wealthy —false prophets who led us right back to where we started, having in the process left us far more cynical and divided than we were before, all as the result of a fruitless, and fundamentally mundane, perambulation.
Fifth: Leftist parents and teachers hoping to “ally” with “the youth” — using SEL as a virtuous and solidarity-inspiring delivery method — are proving far too cringe for all but the most faux-earnest brown-nosing Gen Z freaks.
Add in corporate sponsors? And being BASED is an outlaw pose.
Conservatism is now punk.
Sixth: Bud Light and Target continue to reel. Garth Brooks, for some reason only he knows, decided to weigh in, announcing his bar in Nashville will proudly serve Tranheuser-Busch’s weak gay gravy — likely at an exorbitant price.
Or, to put it another way, Garth Brooks is providing a safe and inclusive space for tranny beer in the heart of Nashville, where no competing bars offering live, pop-country music and kitschy cowboy fare can be readily found!
Brokeback Mountain isn’t just a love story: it’s proof of concept for the Garth Brooks’ inclusive, love-is-love! saloon, whose rainbow doors swing, in the immortal words of Eddie Rabbit, every which way but loose.
I got friends in low places /
where the whiskey flows and the trans beer chases /
the dudes away /
But I’ll be okay /
Because I’m already rich as fuck.
Seventh, and touching on one of my earlier thoughts: Non-astroturfed “youth” reacting to relentless “Pride” fare being forced down their collective gullets by government-funded scolds, commercialized virtue signalers, and damaged liberal box wine moms are becoming based. And it’s glorious!
In fact, if one can be so bold as to capture the sentiment in meme form, this is it, expressed to perfection:
Not too long ago it was de rigueur to write off Gen Z and its subsequent tagalongs as a lost cause — one that was going to doom us to a life of Woke struggle sessions and having our girlfriends raped by nerds mimicking our Homecoming costumes.
Now, however, I’m not so sure.
There exists in the American psyche an almost genetic refusal to accept indoctrination once it becomes clear that the indoctrination is coming from people who, it turns out, are those you least want to imitate or align yourselves with if you’re kid ready to meet the world on your own independent terms.
The left has overplayed its hand, I believe. That purple-haired teacher with the ostentatious made-up pronouns who was cool in third grade? Is, by the time you reach the end of high school, something of a ridiculous, pathetic, and altogether skeevy character — one who you now understand isn’t just Queer and proud, but rather spends xir weekends dressing up as a fucking otter and engaging in group sex with an entire zoo of lost and depressing Furries who’ve coalesced around a fringe fetish that, when you look at it in the light of late teen cynicism, is really just perversion shrouded in the protection of Theory you never really completely bought into to begin with. So, like, yuck.
At least, that’s where I hope we are.
Anyway, that’s about all my wrist can handle. Have a great week! And until we meet again, remember:
Outlaw.
******
I lolllled at a lot of this.
As for the youth rejecting the chapped-thighed, Target-bought fluorescent hair-dyed and personality-disorder-du-jour woke ambassadors knows as "educators" (they can't just be teachers)...I find a lot of kids are laughing their asses off at them. It's wonderful! And I encourage it when I hear about it. (But I can't encourage it too much because I'm like a grown up and stuff. They have to arrive at their resistance on their own.)
One US community ditches the Alphabet Soup flag: https://apnews.com/article/hamtramck-michigan-no-pride-flags-c380f8cdad592d69af9b2080ab4cc9cd
It's a start....