Okay, this is huge, so I have to chew it down...
I fucking hate conspiracy theories...yadda, yadda...Illuminati bullshit.
The illuminati bullshit is just to make you anti-government so they can appeal to radical individualism.
But radical individualists aren't.
They're a fucking herd.
The same herd who did Jan 6th.
But encountering it twice in one day...yadda, yadda TLC and History Channel.
What TLC and History channel have in common, and it's with all TV networks, broadcast or cable, is having corporate overlords.
Corporate overlords aren't big on real education, because you might start questioning why that big red, white, and blue dick is up your ass.
The show was called "secrets of the dollar bill"...yadda, yadda Freemasons.
They make you scared of money, but they don't tell you to forsake capitalism.
That says it all.
These are the "buy gold!!" people.
Anyway, the imagined endgame of this global conspiracy, is "a Godless world!".
Oh no!! Not no God!!
So, y'know, as an atheist, I laughed, and said "GOOD! Sign me up for the fucking Freemasons! Yay, Freemasons!".
Authoritarians can't do without God.
Oh, and of course, this was a religious wingnut talking, so...yadda, yadda, Satan, yadda, yadda, fear.
Fear is all authoritarians have.
They have no true philosophy because they can't govern.
They've proven they have no intention of governing.
All they know how to do is kill enemies and burglarize the treasury.
They're just criminals with grander ambitions than the stickup man.
That's it. It's no more complicated than that.
And getting back to the Christian part of it...yadda, yadda, faith, yadda, yadda, dying to go see Jesus.
There are good Christians making an underground railroad for Haitian migrants.
The Dawkins movement going after the greed-is-good Christians was a game of fish-in-the-barrel.
Of course the greed-is-good Christians are over represented in our culture. Because again, corporate media.
But yeah, the default position...yadda, yadda, how do you know the conspiracy theorist isn't part of the conspiracy?
Conspiracy theorists aren't looking to be liberated from lies.
They're looking for the right big-daddy to snuggle up to, and they need a permission structure.
You don't need a convoluted permission structure for a good cause.
People with horrible beliefs want to be told they're good.
They need the chaotic folly they've devoted themselves to make sense.
And indeed...yadda, yadda, reductionist argument for finding truth in the madness, and building up from scratch.
Again, conspiracy thinkers will never put this level of thought in because it's not about truth; it's about permission structures to be the worst versions of themselves, and absolving themselves of guilt.
Well, I believe in...yadda, yadda, science is good.
The Trumpists are indeed attacking science, and it is indeed destroying civilization.
BUT!! The preventative sure as fuck wasn't bootlicking the tech-bros.
Richard Dawkins still can't extract his tongue from Elon Musk's asshole.
Elon Musk has committed genocide with his USAID cuts.
The media keeps calling them cuts, but USAID has been oblivion-ized.
That's like calling a beheading a circumcision.
There was never a capitalist way out of this.
Dawkins worships tech bros; Hitchens was a western imperialist; and Sam Harris still is, and has stepped on the gas pedal, and wants done to European Muslims what Trump is doing to Haitians, and Israel is doing to Palestinians.
But this is the atheist movement you get under a corporate media.
These are the books that get published.
And that's if the conspiracies are true....yadda, yadda, supply evidence
P.S. Blow me.
I took no end of shit from snob-atheists for throwing that random "blow me" in there.
They all then proceeded to follow Dawkins, Harris, and other shit-lib atheists off the cliff into tech-bro imperialist genocide Hell.
Their precious Elon killed millions of people, and gave a Hitler salute, but gosh, I'd better not say anything "indecent".
While I was getting chided for "blow me" like I was a naughty elementary school kid, they were rusty trombone-ing Elon.
The hypocrisy is just fucking staggering.
And let's just look at the plausibility of these fucking conspiracies.....yadda, yadda, more reductionism, more building morals back up from scratch.
There's one real conspiracy theory, and it's rich people.
Follow the money.
War, genocide, pogroms, division by bigotry, it's all the wealthy class.
The Epstein class.
Dawkins was an Epstein buddy.
Ditto Harris.
There's literally a fucking series of Epstein e-mails where he invents the trans panic.
34 year old me was almost there.
I was even having Spidey-sense moments about Dawkins and Harris, but I kept getting gaslit away from it.
Greed-is-good religion, bomb-throwing religion, and western imperialism are all the same fucking problem.
You don't fix one with the other.
You don't bomb your way to no more fundamentalism.
"My bombs are bigger than your bombs" isn't an "enlightenment value".
Or, maybe it is. There were some assholes in the enlightenment along with the good guys.
It was a free-for-all by design.
Just like Bible verses, if you want to be a scumbag, you can find your philosopher.
When guys like Sam Harris say "enlightenment values" while being warmongers, it's a dog whistle for white. That's it. The people who accused him of being racist from the jump were always right.
Really, fascism is just western imperialism and "winners vs losers" capitalism taken to their natural conclusions.
If you believe some cultures are better than others, and some groups of people are better than others, a Hitler or Trump is going to come along, and go "well, how can you object to what I'm doing then?".
Which is why I said further up there was a never a capitalist way out of this.
That's the conclusion 34 year old me was always carefully guided away from.
I was playing pin the tail on the donkey with no donkey on the wall.
But even with no donkey in the whole house, and wandering outside, and out into a field, I still almost hit the real fucking donkey.
Even blindfolded and deliberately pointed in the wrong direction, I still almost got it.
So, for that reason alone, I'm still proud of younger me.
It's a swing and a miss, but it was a microscopicly close miss.
Its both alleviating and infuriating.
7 comments:
I sort of always kept Christopher Hitchens at arms' length, and it wasn't just because he started palling around with the Bush/Iraq War crowd, which was made most people who used to like him start hating him. I think it's because by the time he bit the dust I was starting to get sick of even trying to have any public intellectual figure (from any side of the political spectrum) as a big "hero," like that's something you'd only do when you were 19. And that was because all of these guys were only ever good at tearing shit down--NEVER at putting anything better in its place (this is par for the course with intellectuals in general, sadly.) Noam Chomsky sure could make you believe how corrupt and terrible everything was, but what was his big answer to solve everything? "Anarcho-syndicalism"? Is that even really a thing? And of course Hitchens was one of those people who always had to say things to sting people with barbs just so he could immediately thumb his nose at you with the 1st amendment, like when he said about Wanda Sykes "the black dyke was unfunny" or whatever it was. The problem was, I never actually read any of his books, just parts of them. And now I don't even feel like bothering.
Sam Harris, though? At least I was sort of impressed or intimidated a bit with Dawkins and Hitchens--what I read of Harris never impressed me for ten seconds, he seemed like a glorified blogger or undergrad or something. At least the other guys had far to fall!
I don't know who the big atheist leader/hero/public figure even is anymore, but whoever it is, at least you won't have to build them up this time around.
RE: Chomsky. He's an Epstein buddy, so he's no anarcho-syndicalist. Chomsky, Harris, and Steve Pinker all praised what a fucking genius Epstein was, but when you look at the e-mails, he was a fucking moron. They had to spin the yarn of that asshole being brilliant to run cover for them being pathetic loathsome boot licks trying to get some of his sweet, sweet, money. And, yeah, probably teen pussy.
Re: Harris. Yeah, I always found him kinda mediocre too, but Dawkins thought he was hot shit for some reason. He came in acting like everyone's pal, but he's a frothing warmonger now. Like, Pete Hegseth level nuts.
Re: The new big leader. Nobody. There's nobody. And that's probably a good thing. There are plenty of good guys still pushing against organized religion being in bed with Republicans, but no, the "four horsemen" thing is burned to the ground. The only one left over from the Dawkins days who ran in their circles who didn't go rotten, and turn into a TERF or something (that I can think of off the top of my head) is Hemant Mehta AKA "The Friendly Atheist". He's still doing good stuff.
Oh, and finished "The Boats of the Glen Carig" and am almost done with "The Ghost Pirates" . Then, finally, it'll be "The Night Land".
"Pirates" done! Time to crack open "The Night Land" at last!
150 pages in!! Loving it! The language isn't hard at all. It's an overblown warning. You read a lot, so you must have a good mental dictionary by now. You'd handle it fine.
Oh no, I did "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Ulysses" over 20 years ago, I'm not scared of books full of difficult language. But sometimes I have a hard time remembering what's in them--"Riddley Walker" is a great example.
Right now I'm re-reading a bunch of books from my 2006 reading spree, which marked the first time I was seriously trying to read lots and lots of books outside of class, the 20th anniversary of these reads will probably take up the rest of 2006. 2007 is going to be "Gravity's Rainbow" re-read which will suck up a lot of time and I"m also going to do all the big Stephen Kings I missed.
Just finally whupped "The Night Land". The first two thirds are everything you want, but that last chunk kicked my ass. It's very hard to describe without me ending up doing the blog post here. Stay tuned for the review. Holy shit.
Post a Comment