Tossers, Bellends, and the Overdone Window

At the same time our governments and their representatives are putting on their grave and serious faces and telling us that the rise of “misinformation” is a dangerous threat to be reckoned with and giving themselves new powers to censor it, we have people making the following kind of statements that are usually not considered to be misinformation :

• 98% - 99% of black people were better off as slaves than they are today

• Transwomen are women

• The sex binary was created in the 19th Century as a means to oppress black and indigenous people

• Certain hairstyles are owned by black people

• Surgical masks work to protect people from airborne aerosolized viruses

• In order to save the planet we need to stop eating meat

• Sex in humans exists on a spectrum

• Perfectly normal and almost universal behaviours described as being “rooted in white supremacy”

And this is just a tiny, tiny, fraction of the kind of absolute bollocks that is spewed out on a daily basis by morons today.

We’ve always had people, shall we say, on the fringe. People who, for one reason or another, have somewhat eccentric ideas. Mostly, in the past, these people were considered to be harmless oddballs and we kind of had a bit of a soft-spot for them. It’s only recently have such people been more universally described as “dangerous”.

The ideas and claims I’ve listed above are not, by many, seen in the same vein. We might all have a bit of a chuckle at a flat earther, but it’s not often do we see the above ideas put into the same kind of “just fucking potty” class, like we would with the notion of a flat earth. But the ideas above (and the many thousands like them that, to some extent, get taken seriously) are almost every bit as deranged as the flat earth hypothesis.

These kind of ideas should be put in the “eccentric” class - but they’re not. And that worries me. I certainly wouldn’t want to censor them, but I don’t want to take them seriously, either, because they can’t properly be taken seriously by any one still in possession of any degree of rationality.

The concept of the Overton Window was generated to describe how ideas exist within some window of acceptability that shapes public discourse.

I think we need a similar kind of concept to describe the shift we’ve experienced in recent times to considering the fucking potty as being, somehow, reasonable. We could call this the Overdone Window.

Previously we might have characterized ideas a bit like this

where most ideas lived in a kind of range of reasonableness.

Today, however, the notion of what is considered “reasonable”, the large pink box in the chart above, has shifted quite a bit to the right and we’re now well into Klingon territory, at the very least.

The Daily Sceptic ran a piece about Carl Borg-Neal (what a great name) who, as a line manager for Lloyds Bank, attended an online “training” session - and before I reveal what kind of “training” it was, perhaps you could guess?

Yes - you all guessed it correctly - it was one of those where you learn to speak Klingon about how to DIE by being stripped of any last remaining vestige of dignity.

Of course, he said the Wrong™ thing.

From The Daily Sceptic :

Thinking partly about rap music, he asked how as a line manager he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if used by a white person. Met with a puzzled look from the trainer, he added, “The most common example being use of the word n***** in the black community.”

And you all know what’s coming next, don’t you?

That thing that just never happens; the mythical cancellation process that is just something made up by far-right hate groups.

Carl was eventually dismissed for “gross misconduct”.

The trainer was so badly “traumatized” it had to take 5 days off work. I hope this absolute tit never does actually listen to any rap music - its tiny little head would explode.

In no sane and rational world could what Carl said ever be described as being unreasonable. I was going to say beyond the pale, but I suppose, technically, it was.

In no sane and rational world could the (alleged) “trauma” suffered by the trainer be described as a reasonable response.

In no sane and rational world could the action of Lloyds Bank be described as reasonable or just.

But the Overdone Window has shifted so far that stuff like this is not considered to be BatShitCrazy™ (the new Rigger-approved terminology for ‘woke’) anymore.

This n-word double standard has been commented upon for some time. You can dance and hop about to any number of songs in which you’ll hear this word (sung by people with the appropriate skin shade) - and a jolly good time is had by all.

But, Oh My Fucking God With Bells On, if a white person ever utters this word, even without any malice whatsoever - as in the case of Carl, it causes a galactic-level meltdown with counselling and psychiatric services completely overrun with trauma patients.

We’re seeing this kind of thing everywhere. Comments that were, until very recently, considered to be entirely reasonable and proportionate, like Carl’s, are now dismissed as “hateful”, or some other such nonsense.

TeamSane™ : I really think we need to put a pause on puberty blockers for kids until we figure out their long-term consequences
TeamBatShitCrazy™ : hateful bigot!

TeamSane™ : most kids who experience some degree of gender non-conformity have their issues resolved by puberty
TeamBatShitCrazy™ : hateful bigot!

TeamSane™ : I don’t agree that Canada is more racist than the US. In fact, I question the whole basis upon which you describe either the US or Canada as being “racist”
TeamBatShitCrazy™ : hateful bigot!

TeamSane™ : what evidence do you have that our university is steeped in white supremacy and is institutionally racist?
TeamBatShitCrazy™ : hateful bigot!

It’s a bit hard to have a meaningful conversation with people who have lost the meaning of the word meaning.

Much of this is being cheered on by people who believe they’re doing the right thing; they want to be seen as being good people. There’s not much else going on in their heads, unfortunately, because they can’t see that they’re really acting in the service of evil.

These are just the so-called Useful Idiots, the cannon-fodder of the more deliberate and academic woke activist. They just don’t see how they’re actually making things worse for everyone.

Then there’s another chunk of the woke blob who know it’s all fucking potty, but who support it all, or at the very least keep quiet, because they have loans, kids and a mortgage.

I still haven’t heard any benefits for the end-user in moving to a Central Bank Digital Currency, but what does concern me is the increasing use of banks and financial services as a kind of soft Gestapo. Say The Wrong™ thing and you won’t even be able to buy that McMaggot Burger, let alone a steak.

When you couple this with the astonishingly totalitarian move by the EU, for example, to completely control and dominate the online narrative - where platforms can be subject to ridiculously heavy financial penalties for not removing stuff the government (yes, the government) deems to be “misinformation” - then we’re heading into very dangerous territory.

In the past, where “reasonableness” might have been expected, the impact of this might not have been so consequential. It still would have been utterly unethical and totalitarian, but at least we could rely on the rules being applied with some degree of reasonableness.

But when the Overdone Window has shifted so much, when the average degree of current “reasonableness” looks like Klingon to someone from 2 decades ago, then we’re in trouble.

This is why we need laws and constitutions that limit government. Reasonableness is not guaranteed. The very last people on earth who should be able to define what is reasonable, and what is not, are politicians and governments.

Reasonableness ought to be an emergent property from proper discourse - but if you won’t allow that discourse to happen in the first place, then reasonableness will be strangled at birth.

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Appendix :

I was going to use this post as an opportunity to talk about something called The Central Limit Theorem which, very (very) roughly speaking is a result that says that any probability distribution, for a large enough number of trials, looks like a Bell curve, a Gaussian. I was going to talk about tossing coins (hence the word “tossers” in the title) and how for a large enough number of tosses, the distribution looks like a Bell curve.

But it all turned into something different as I was writing.

Just in case you were wondering