Trying to make sense of the woke insanity is like trying to find intelligent guidance from reading the contents of a tin of alphabet spaghetti poured across a kitchen counter.... unless you understand that those pushing it are doing so as part of a plan to weaken society via the use of cultural Marxism. Take a tiny group, empower them, love them and tell them they are victims of the 98 percent of “Normal” people who are evil. Use the media to relentlessly attack normal as evil, fund them via non profits and advocacy groups (Soros funds) and you have a bit turmoil. Do this on as many fronts as you can ( climate nuts, Cross Dressers, Groomers, Blacks, Muslims, Democrats) and you have an insane society at war with itself. A weak confused and perhaps easily controlled and or conquered people.
I think the thing I struggle most with is that so much of it is absolutely batshit insane - and yet it's taken **seriously**
At least with things like the mask lunacy there was some "justification" - it is at least sort of plausible that a mask might reduce emitted virions. Plausible until you spend more than about 3 seconds thinking about it, that is.
But much of the 'woke' stuff is just like something from Monty Python - it's completely fucking nuts.
Almost none of this stuff would have been taken seriously 20 years ago (outside of the rarefied atmosphere of 'academia' where weirdos were taking it, and themselves, far too seriously). So what changed?
Yeah, same here. Unf**7ingbelievable! I had a break-through of sorts, watching some vvvery graphic pictures in regards to reassignment surgeries, well, one has to be seriously disturbed to go through this, so is it not remotely possible that what you're talking about in this (very fine, btw) essay is just some milder in its manifestation, but same kind of mental disturbance? I'm definately not smart enough to speculate as to the possible sources but judging by the societal areas of its occurrence it doesn't seem to be "universal", so maybe there is hope (?). And, someone has coined a new word: kakademia
I am sure most of us have heard of the terrible two's, when a toddler goes from wondering at everything to essentially saying NO most of the time. Well, for the majority of my life of near 60 years it seems society was about (being encouraged by 'forces') to say NO to things like a 2 year old. NO to traditional womens roles, NO to traditional men's roles, NO to eating meat, NO to simple foods, NO to learning the trades, NO to heating and cooking with firewood or even gas, NO to wool and cotton, NO to combustion engines...all in favor of some latest thing. At some point one realizes that living in NO is no way to live.
The idea that women could not own property in their own right, or vote, or access professional employment (they were prevented from taking university positions, for example) and lots of other things. All of these things we should have said NO too - and much earlier than we actually did.
But maybe we've tried to say NO to too much?
If you take something like feminism (which is a very broad church) then it has helped to change the lives of many women for the better. But it has also, in that process, undervalued women's traditional roles. They say it's about choice, but you'll hardly ever hear a rad fem talk glowingly about a woman who chooses to be a housewife - it's definitely seen as a 'second class' choice.
I think your drawing a parallel with toddlers is very apposite. One thing about toddlers is that they haven't really figured out "when to stop". A lot of things start with the best of intentions and for good reasons but they just seem to end up going too far.
Computer games. When you're a computer game character you never die and there are no consequences for your actions. You can be anything you want to be and even the rules of physics don't apply. I think some folk are living their lives like a PC game character.
That's something I hadn't thought about. I know people say things like video gaming doesn't have an effect on things like violence etc, but what **does** it have an effect on?
I like your analysis, and suspect that one of the mixed blessings of modernity is to have trained us— conditioned us, I mean— towards faster and faster gratification. Hungry? I no longer have to season the near, chop the veggies, and spend an hour over the stove. I can pop something in the microwave, or order delivery, or snack on a bag of chips…but first, really, because I have so many choices, I really have to figure out who I am and how I feel. Do I even eat meat? Am I the kind of person who eats TV dinners? Am I the kind of person who has a penis while doing those things? Is a person who just wants chips and beer for dinner a man or a woman? Who am I? And who can I tell?
The pace of modern life is probably not psychologically healthy - and there has to be a reason for the massive use of things like anti-depressants (even though they don't really work too well). Maybe the frenetic scramble just to live and make things work day by day is not all that great a way to live.
I love the character of Granny Weatherwax in the Discworld books - she knows **exactly** who she is and doesn't need to tell anyone about it either. They soon find out 😆
Make it the mid-1990s, and you're bang on the money. See, the ideas you're being exposed to (or perhaps, the ideas which are exposing themselves to you?) aren't new for this or the previous decade, they're old. Old enough to collect a pension some of them.
What happened was, generation one of radicals, the one born in the late 1940s and who entered the machine at the bottom tier in the late 1960s opened the door for the next batch, those born in the 1970s, and these in turn opened the door to the present bunch around 2010 to 2015.
Thus the brood grew and grew and became the Normal by virtue of controlling the mediums of communication and the tutoring of perceptions and the understanding of words.
The idea that a woman can have a penis (not, not the normal way - the abnormal way) was bandied about in the 1970s, because postmodernism/deconstructionism was all the rage. Like the old joke about the man entering the pub with a frog on his head, being asked "Why d'you have frog on your head?" an the frog replying: "It started as a wart in my ass!", this general movement grew from then to now.
I protest the term "trad" most vehemently: the correct word is normal. "Trad" is only possible a stance if you first accept the feminist (woke, queer, PC, trans, WTFBBQ, et c) premise, and create your position relative it, thereby implicitly legitimising it to yourself as a valid stance, and defeating your own arguments beforehand, since you have placed yourself on the defensive.
It's like "anti-racism", it is only possible to be that if you are racist in the first place, seeing individuals as token representatives of racial collectives first and as unique people last.
You can however decide to not be racist, or be reasonably racist: - for instance demanding genital mutilation be outlawed no matter the race of the perpetrator/victim. Doing so is racist, as the view that children shouldn't be mutilated due to being born to a specific race, is imposing another race's value system and ranking it as arbitrarily better. Insisting it should be legal dependent on the race of those involved is also racist by the same logic.
Racist can of course be replaced by any other -phobic or -ist used by the PC-kommissars (that's what the woke was initially called, Politically Correct, after a term coined by Lenin himself, small wonder they rebranded it to woke) to the same effect and result.
Technically speaking, none of this stuff is new. But it was confined to the nuthouses known as universities.
Unfortunately, the safety protocols for these mind virus labs were not strong enough and the infections escaped.
The academics in certain departments might have been indulging in this mutual masturbation fest of crackpottery, but none of those ideas had really gained traction "out in the wild" - or the real world, as we should say.
But over the last decade or so it has exploded out of these institutions and infected everywhere. I suppose it's like an avalanche which starts from a single dislodged pebble and takes time to build into something more serious.
I'm not sure I'd view being opposed to something like FGM, say, as "racist" - although the 'woke' probably would. I think some cultural 'traditions' are superior to others - and objectively so. It has nothing to do with the skin colour of the people following those traditions - but of course you won't convince the woke of that.
About your last paragraph: that mix-up stems from this:
After WW2, european social science, humanities and the rest of academia to say nothing of the rest of ur civilisation, cultures and societies dropped the concept of [race] like a hot turd - for rather good reasons, having been exposed first-hand to the logical extreme of racialist thinking.
The US didn't, instead they used and still use to this day the concept of [race] where we say [kultur]. I'm using the swedish/german spelling to emphasise that it is kultur as the sociological-anthropological concept, not the entertainment and art-industry meaning.
As US cultural imperialism became the dominant force among the humanities in the late 1980s and the 1990s (even in France!), the american concept of race became the filter and sieve used in understanding cultural issues.
Meaning that genital mutilation became not an act of abuse against a child no matter the cultures involved but abuse or custom depending on race, meaning actual real classical racism where the value and ethics of an act is determined by the races involved and not the act itself.
So what is seen as mental illness and abuse if done by white western parents against their child, is seen as a quaint old-fashioned cultural custom is done by egyptians (a stance doubly racist since it simultaneously implies that "we" have a sort-of "white intellectuals' burden" to educate the poor widdle savages of the (t)error of their ways...) or jews.
And this is what pried the door off its hinges re: "gender transitioning" of children. There's no normal. All cultural values are arbitrary and man-made and can therefore be re-made to suit purpose, one instant after the next. History is a hierarchical concept used to legitimise current power disparity, therefore the thing you said was right and good and sacro-sanct yesterday is the vilest ooze of the Pit today, and vice versa tomorrow. Atthe same time.
Personally, I've been responding to accusations of racism with a cheery "Absolutely!"+ example of horrid traditional customs and an equally hearty "I feel it our duty to prevent abuse such as that, since all humans are equal in rights, don't you agree?"
At least, it lead to woke (Politically Correct) colleagues and friends no longer daring to use the word "racism/-ist" around me.
I have friends on both sides of the political spectrum that do ‘parrot’ everything that confirms their bias. As for myself I’m skeptical of everything. I will change my opinion if I can be convinced via rational discussion. Unfortunately there isn’t much of that for quite a few years.
Add to this the phenomenon of the 'Generation Snowflake', as expressed by Busqueros in the Daily Sceptic, and noted also by Glenn Loury here on Substack, leads me to scream in frustration
GALLIMAUFRY. This is the best new word since you invented PANICDEMIC (coincidentally within days of me using that very word to describe the reaction to the virus developed in a lab in China).
As to the cause of this weirdness, I think it must always have existed but the internet has made it as easy easy to spread as peanut butter. And the weird fascists spreading it insisted that anyone who demurred was a real fascist.
Weird ideas are one thing, but the widespread UGLIFICATION of personal grooming is imponderable. Yesterday I was waiting in line in a golf shop when a middle aged man in an oversized black suit, a fedora, and shoulder length hair walked past us directly to the back counter to pick up a box of repaired clubs. He took no notice of anyone and I muttered to the normal guy in front of me in the line, “that guy must be important”.
I was contemplating this very thing only a few days ago after reading some gibberish about transgenderism. That people earnestly and seriously discuss this nonsense as though its real is quite bizarre.
There are points of view being seriously espoused today that would've landed the espousers in in a padded room only a few years ago.
I said to my wife just the other day that if someone marched down the street shouting that they were Napoleon they'd probably be locked up for their own good, even today. But large hairy men can march down the street shouting that they're women, and if you point out the absurdity of the claim you're automatically a bigot who should lose your job.
Robert Heinlein write about the "crazy years" in his future universe, and now we're actually living through them. Hopefully sanity will return at some point.
Transgenderism is real but it is very rare. Dylan Mulvaney is obviously transgendered. There is not a masculine bone in his body, even if it has not been lopped off.
What’s wrong with the old word effeminate? He is clearly a man just an effeminate one. He’s not transitioning into a woman... he can not transition into anything as he is a man. A mentally ill man certainly.
RP has tossed a veritable vesuvian word salad into the gaping maws of his faithful readers...we chokingly cheer Your eloquence...@John re-Upside down... www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKau-sqzsY ODD SQUAD -Season 2 - Negative Town ..
TVOkids
===
'Agents Olympia and Otis go to negative town, where its always night, and the houses are numbered below zero, negative numbers. They meet Mayor Glumly, who leads them to a woman who can't stop dancing - the victim of a villain known for her sparkly outfit and tendency to attack in a pattern. Will Olympia and Otis find the villain, or will the residents of Negative Town dance forever?'
Trying to make sense of the woke insanity is like trying to find intelligent guidance from reading the contents of a tin of alphabet spaghetti poured across a kitchen counter.... unless you understand that those pushing it are doing so as part of a plan to weaken society via the use of cultural Marxism. Take a tiny group, empower them, love them and tell them they are victims of the 98 percent of “Normal” people who are evil. Use the media to relentlessly attack normal as evil, fund them via non profits and advocacy groups (Soros funds) and you have a bit turmoil. Do this on as many fronts as you can ( climate nuts, Cross Dressers, Groomers, Blacks, Muslims, Democrats) and you have an insane society at war with itself. A weak confused and perhaps easily controlled and or conquered people.
I think the thing I struggle most with is that so much of it is absolutely batshit insane - and yet it's taken **seriously**
At least with things like the mask lunacy there was some "justification" - it is at least sort of plausible that a mask might reduce emitted virions. Plausible until you spend more than about 3 seconds thinking about it, that is.
But much of the 'woke' stuff is just like something from Monty Python - it's completely fucking nuts.
Almost none of this stuff would have been taken seriously 20 years ago (outside of the rarefied atmosphere of 'academia' where weirdos were taking it, and themselves, far too seriously). So what changed?
Yeah, same here. Unf**7ingbelievable! I had a break-through of sorts, watching some vvvery graphic pictures in regards to reassignment surgeries, well, one has to be seriously disturbed to go through this, so is it not remotely possible that what you're talking about in this (very fine, btw) essay is just some milder in its manifestation, but same kind of mental disturbance? I'm definately not smart enough to speculate as to the possible sources but judging by the societal areas of its occurrence it doesn't seem to be "universal", so maybe there is hope (?). And, someone has coined a new word: kakademia
which I think it is rather fitting.
At times I think that I'm either:
1 - one of the few sane people left in existence
or
2 - I'm in the wrong trouser leg of time
or
3 - I'm completely mad and the rest of the world is made up of the normal people
I think it's a mix of 1 and 2 as are you Rudolph, the lot at LockdownSceptics and a few others.
wrong trouser leg of time with your underpants back to front and inside out 😆
I am sure most of us have heard of the terrible two's, when a toddler goes from wondering at everything to essentially saying NO most of the time. Well, for the majority of my life of near 60 years it seems society was about (being encouraged by 'forces') to say NO to things like a 2 year old. NO to traditional womens roles, NO to traditional men's roles, NO to eating meat, NO to simple foods, NO to learning the trades, NO to heating and cooking with firewood or even gas, NO to wool and cotton, NO to combustion engines...all in favor of some latest thing. At some point one realizes that living in NO is no way to live.
I think it was right to say NO to some things.
The idea that women could not own property in their own right, or vote, or access professional employment (they were prevented from taking university positions, for example) and lots of other things. All of these things we should have said NO too - and much earlier than we actually did.
But maybe we've tried to say NO to too much?
If you take something like feminism (which is a very broad church) then it has helped to change the lives of many women for the better. But it has also, in that process, undervalued women's traditional roles. They say it's about choice, but you'll hardly ever hear a rad fem talk glowingly about a woman who chooses to be a housewife - it's definitely seen as a 'second class' choice.
I think your drawing a parallel with toddlers is very apposite. One thing about toddlers is that they haven't really figured out "when to stop". A lot of things start with the best of intentions and for good reasons but they just seem to end up going too far.
Orthodoxy never seems to be a good solution to societal problems.
Computer games. When you're a computer game character you never die and there are no consequences for your actions. You can be anything you want to be and even the rules of physics don't apply. I think some folk are living their lives like a PC game character.
That's something I hadn't thought about. I know people say things like video gaming doesn't have an effect on things like violence etc, but what **does** it have an effect on?
Interesting
Parallel universe? We’re all living in the Upside Down.
I like your analysis, and suspect that one of the mixed blessings of modernity is to have trained us— conditioned us, I mean— towards faster and faster gratification. Hungry? I no longer have to season the near, chop the veggies, and spend an hour over the stove. I can pop something in the microwave, or order delivery, or snack on a bag of chips…but first, really, because I have so many choices, I really have to figure out who I am and how I feel. Do I even eat meat? Am I the kind of person who eats TV dinners? Am I the kind of person who has a penis while doing those things? Is a person who just wants chips and beer for dinner a man or a woman? Who am I? And who can I tell?
The pace of modern life is probably not psychologically healthy - and there has to be a reason for the massive use of things like anti-depressants (even though they don't really work too well). Maybe the frenetic scramble just to live and make things work day by day is not all that great a way to live.
I love the character of Granny Weatherwax in the Discworld books - she knows **exactly** who she is and doesn't need to tell anyone about it either. They soon find out 😆
Not a decade ago, no.
Make it the mid-1990s, and you're bang on the money. See, the ideas you're being exposed to (or perhaps, the ideas which are exposing themselves to you?) aren't new for this or the previous decade, they're old. Old enough to collect a pension some of them.
What happened was, generation one of radicals, the one born in the late 1940s and who entered the machine at the bottom tier in the late 1960s opened the door for the next batch, those born in the 1970s, and these in turn opened the door to the present bunch around 2010 to 2015.
Thus the brood grew and grew and became the Normal by virtue of controlling the mediums of communication and the tutoring of perceptions and the understanding of words.
The idea that a woman can have a penis (not, not the normal way - the abnormal way) was bandied about in the 1970s, because postmodernism/deconstructionism was all the rage. Like the old joke about the man entering the pub with a frog on his head, being asked "Why d'you have frog on your head?" an the frog replying: "It started as a wart in my ass!", this general movement grew from then to now.
I protest the term "trad" most vehemently: the correct word is normal. "Trad" is only possible a stance if you first accept the feminist (woke, queer, PC, trans, WTFBBQ, et c) premise, and create your position relative it, thereby implicitly legitimising it to yourself as a valid stance, and defeating your own arguments beforehand, since you have placed yourself on the defensive.
It's like "anti-racism", it is only possible to be that if you are racist in the first place, seeing individuals as token representatives of racial collectives first and as unique people last.
You can however decide to not be racist, or be reasonably racist: - for instance demanding genital mutilation be outlawed no matter the race of the perpetrator/victim. Doing so is racist, as the view that children shouldn't be mutilated due to being born to a specific race, is imposing another race's value system and ranking it as arbitrarily better. Insisting it should be legal dependent on the race of those involved is also racist by the same logic.
Racist can of course be replaced by any other -phobic or -ist used by the PC-kommissars (that's what the woke was initially called, Politically Correct, after a term coined by Lenin himself, small wonder they rebranded it to woke) to the same effect and result.
Yes - you're right.
Technically speaking, none of this stuff is new. But it was confined to the nuthouses known as universities.
Unfortunately, the safety protocols for these mind virus labs were not strong enough and the infections escaped.
The academics in certain departments might have been indulging in this mutual masturbation fest of crackpottery, but none of those ideas had really gained traction "out in the wild" - or the real world, as we should say.
But over the last decade or so it has exploded out of these institutions and infected everywhere. I suppose it's like an avalanche which starts from a single dislodged pebble and takes time to build into something more serious.
I'm not sure I'd view being opposed to something like FGM, say, as "racist" - although the 'woke' probably would. I think some cultural 'traditions' are superior to others - and objectively so. It has nothing to do with the skin colour of the people following those traditions - but of course you won't convince the woke of that.
About your last paragraph: that mix-up stems from this:
After WW2, european social science, humanities and the rest of academia to say nothing of the rest of ur civilisation, cultures and societies dropped the concept of [race] like a hot turd - for rather good reasons, having been exposed first-hand to the logical extreme of racialist thinking.
The US didn't, instead they used and still use to this day the concept of [race] where we say [kultur]. I'm using the swedish/german spelling to emphasise that it is kultur as the sociological-anthropological concept, not the entertainment and art-industry meaning.
As US cultural imperialism became the dominant force among the humanities in the late 1980s and the 1990s (even in France!), the american concept of race became the filter and sieve used in understanding cultural issues.
Meaning that genital mutilation became not an act of abuse against a child no matter the cultures involved but abuse or custom depending on race, meaning actual real classical racism where the value and ethics of an act is determined by the races involved and not the act itself.
So what is seen as mental illness and abuse if done by white western parents against their child, is seen as a quaint old-fashioned cultural custom is done by egyptians (a stance doubly racist since it simultaneously implies that "we" have a sort-of "white intellectuals' burden" to educate the poor widdle savages of the (t)error of their ways...) or jews.
And this is what pried the door off its hinges re: "gender transitioning" of children. There's no normal. All cultural values are arbitrary and man-made and can therefore be re-made to suit purpose, one instant after the next. History is a hierarchical concept used to legitimise current power disparity, therefore the thing you said was right and good and sacro-sanct yesterday is the vilest ooze of the Pit today, and vice versa tomorrow. Atthe same time.
Personally, I've been responding to accusations of racism with a cheery "Absolutely!"+ example of horrid traditional customs and an equally hearty "I feel it our duty to prevent abuse such as that, since all humans are equal in rights, don't you agree?"
At least, it lead to woke (Politically Correct) colleagues and friends no longer daring to use the word "racism/-ist" around me.
I have friends on both sides of the political spectrum that do ‘parrot’ everything that confirms their bias. As for myself I’m skeptical of everything. I will change my opinion if I can be convinced via rational discussion. Unfortunately there isn’t much of that for quite a few years.
Yes indeed 'robotic dweebs'.
Add to this the phenomenon of the 'Generation Snowflake', as expressed by Busqueros in the Daily Sceptic, and noted also by Glenn Loury here on Substack, leads me to scream in frustration
"Humanity is Doomed".
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/05/09/the-truth-about-generation-snowflake-is-even-worse-than-we-feared/
"de-construct the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."
everyone knows the answer.
😆
Professor Rigger
GALLIMAUFRY. This is the best new word since you invented PANICDEMIC (coincidentally within days of me using that very word to describe the reaction to the virus developed in a lab in China).
As to the cause of this weirdness, I think it must always have existed but the internet has made it as easy easy to spread as peanut butter. And the weird fascists spreading it insisted that anyone who demurred was a real fascist.
Weird ideas are one thing, but the widespread UGLIFICATION of personal grooming is imponderable. Yesterday I was waiting in line in a golf shop when a middle aged man in an oversized black suit, a fedora, and shoulder length hair walked past us directly to the back counter to pick up a box of repaired clubs. He took no notice of anyone and I muttered to the normal guy in front of me in the line, “that guy must be important”.
Yes - there is a lot of ugly about
I think the woke are internally ugly - as can be evidenced by their deeply nasty attacks on anyone who doesn't trot out the same crap they do.
I was contemplating this very thing only a few days ago after reading some gibberish about transgenderism. That people earnestly and seriously discuss this nonsense as though its real is quite bizarre.
There are points of view being seriously espoused today that would've landed the espousers in in a padded room only a few years ago.
I said to my wife just the other day that if someone marched down the street shouting that they were Napoleon they'd probably be locked up for their own good, even today. But large hairy men can march down the street shouting that they're women, and if you point out the absurdity of the claim you're automatically a bigot who should lose your job.
Robert Heinlein write about the "crazy years" in his future universe, and now we're actually living through them. Hopefully sanity will return at some point.
Transgenderism is real but it is very rare. Dylan Mulvaney is obviously transgendered. There is not a masculine bone in his body, even if it has not been lopped off.
What’s wrong with the old word effeminate? He is clearly a man just an effeminate one. He’s not transitioning into a woman... he can not transition into anything as he is a man. A mentally ill man certainly.
RP has tossed a veritable vesuvian word salad into the gaping maws of his faithful readers...we chokingly cheer Your eloquence...@John re-Upside down... www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKau-sqzsY ODD SQUAD -Season 2 - Negative Town ..
TVOkids
===
'Agents Olympia and Otis go to negative town, where its always night, and the houses are numbered below zero, negative numbers. They meet Mayor Glumly, who leads them to a woman who can't stop dancing - the victim of a villain known for her sparkly outfit and tendency to attack in a pattern. Will Olympia and Otis find the villain, or will the residents of Negative Town dance forever?'
----
usa
https://pbskids.org/video/odd-squad/3005960434
😆
I might have overdone the rhetoric in one or two places!