First they came for the paedophiles.
I lost a lot of respect for Gab.com for banning lolita hentai. Orwell was right (as usual) when he said that all art is political and that the stance that art should be apolitical is itself political.
What this means is that a certain views are banned from gab from a platform that was supposed to be about free speech.
It’s called Hentai and it’s art. The hentai doujin artists in Japan are undoubtedly the most influential art movement in the world. Everyday millions of people draw and read their content all over the world. It is art in its truest form, pornography. It is more art than most of what passes for art in the art galleries of Europe.
Regardless of whether or not you think it is art the consequences of this are fairly self-evident. That is if the conservatives were in power in the media they would too have little scruples to set aside people’s rights for the greater good. You might say that this is a slippery slope fallacy but ideas do have a tendency to be taken to their extremes which is why one of the best ways to see if they are valid is to see what things would be like if these ideas were applied in their extremes. Just look at the history of Christianity. Nobody expects the inquisition.
Of course Gab has a right to censor its platform. The servers on which it is hosted are not mine. But the question is, should they? As far as I am concerned they have broken their promise and as such are nothing more than another partisan platform, nay a publication. My advise to everyone is to set up their own self-hosted blogs and to just use facebook and twitter. If your account gets deleted on just create another one and always drive your readers to your own website.
What have business men ever done for us?
I pity Mark Zuckerberg. On the face of it that statement should make no sense as I am some loser who writes on some blog nobody reads whereas he is a billionaire but the reason that he is pitiable is that he seems unable to justify what he has set out to do. I won’t bother to link to those memes and articles comparing him to a robot and ridiculing him for how unconvincing he is.
His goal of making money by helping people connect to each other is a noble goal. The problem is that after a certain point it is viewed as evil to make money. I mean just look at the way that rising small businesses are viewed until they become big. Ayn Rand was right to explain that the morality of self-sacrifice, of altruism, is what has led the public’s and the intellectuals’ opinion against the businessman however how does this explain the certain admiration for the small business owner who is forging his way up in the world. The explanation is that contradicting values can exist in competition to each other in the same society.
I liked the Ready Player One movie enough that I think I might read the novel it was adapted from. I think I would have liked it a lot better if I had watched when I was younger. I know people running around with VR sets looked pretty silly but I could appreciate the hopeful sentiment behind the silliness. The relationship between the two main leads seemed very unconvincing in a nerd-fantasy way overall but on a certain level it felt very plausible.
In particular after the protagonist achieves fame, money and power how the otherwise disinterested heroine suddenly takes an interest in him. That is only once he has proved his worth to her does she have an interest in him. There is a lot of truth to the notion by MGTOWs that in society (and in dating) women are human beings and men are human doings. That is that in effect women are treated as having intrinsic value as human beings whereas men need to prove their worth as human beings through action. The problem I have with MGTOWs is that they imply that men ought to be treated as having intrinsic value or in other words without ‘doings’(i.e. without doing anything) whereas the real problem is that women are treated as having intrinsic value due to biological reasons that do not apply as strongly any more.
That is, it made sense for women to be regarded as having intrinsic value and be given the de-facto gate-keeping task to reproduction when our survival as a species hinged on us pouring our limited resources to ensuring child-birth but now that capitalism (i.e. our ingenuity) has allowed us to make that task much less riskier I think it is time to acknowledge that to the extent that there is a privilege given in western capitalist society it is to most women and a few men rather than to a few women and most men. Beyond this acknowledgement I do not see a liberal (non-forceful) way of rectifying the inequality of attraction between the sexes which results in more worth being given to women.
Women too are victims of their own privilege (Yes, I know nobody likes to be talked to in this tone but I am simply repaying the favours from many a feminist) by way of being infantilized but here too no forceful manner of action (such as quotas gender quotas in workplaces) ought to be taken if we are to be consistent (which we are not because of aforementioned difference in intrinsic worth given to men and women) but regardless here the trend in the west seems to be positive fortunately as the widespread academic failure(i.e. failure is what academics and journalist like to call ‘under-achievement’) of young men matched with a culture obsessed with academic credentials as an indirect way of gauging ability and a government keen on increasing availability of slightly cheap student loans as a way to keep unemployment figures down (if Tory but mainly for ideological reason of ‘no child left behind’ if Labour) and an international industry of degree mills who have lowered the bar to entry for the social sciences in particular to a dangerous extent.
There was one element that detracted a lot from the story. And that element would be the villain who is a businessman and the side-plot about how the creator of the virtual reality game in which the story took place wanted to keep his pop-culture heaven free of financial interest. My main interest is anime so I am vaguely aware of the many unsavoury tactics such as rampant micro-transaction that gaming companies use to make money. I play some video games but I am not ‘a gamer’ or in other words an hardcore gamer. I could understand the wish that the creator of the vr game to not want to let greed detract from the enjoyment to be had from the game and I could certainly understand the adult corporate villain who could not comprehend the value of pop-culture beyond anything more than a tool to make money and power in the real world however there seems to be a contradiction. Obviously the question of how was the whole thing viable if it was loosing money comes to the fore but the aspirational thinking is the main thrust and not the wish-thinking so lets let that slide. By aspirational thinking as opposed to wish-thinking I mean that it is more of an homage to pop culture for those who are into it rather than a manifesto for how things ought to be – in fact the whole thing is set in a dystopian future. The contradiction comes to the fore when the creator remarks that reality is the only place where one can have a good meal as opposed to all the fantasy worlds which he had created out of pop-culture. Basically, what do you need to have a good meal? Money. If not then how is this nothing more than wish for the real world to be a fantasy by the part of the creator. The protagonist kind of bridges this contradiction by having money, a relationship and becoming the owner of this game world along with his mates.
By the way, just a friendly reminder that there is no moral obligation to dignify the Orwellian linguistic torture by feminists and other social engineers by using terms like ‘business person’ instead of businessman. Focus on the ideas rather than how they are told. Not because words don’t matter but because they matter too much to let them be disfigured by politics.
Tide in. Tide out.
“There is no such thing as the right.” –The Academic Agent
AA is correct. The left exists on a spectrum because they all fundamentally have the same ideal in mind. The right not so much. If you take Thatcher’s ideas a bit further to their extreme will you end up with some American Christian conservative. If you took a Christian conservatives ideas to their extreme would you get Hitler? No. The right is just whoever happens to be against the left at the moment.
The dems won. Hopefully this will ensure that all political action is stalled which is exactly what the wise men who set up this system set it up for. Leaving the sideshow of the international theatre of politics aside let’s talk about something more important.
Well, more important to me. Loneliness.
Normie Propaganda
I am currently reading a novel called Elanour Oliphant and I. It is about Elanour, a lonely woman and her journey towards not being alone. There is something very craven about this story which leads me not to like it. There is a plot but I couldn’t care less about it and the dialogue is atrocious. Fortunately there is very little plot and dialogue as most of the book consists of the thoughts of the main character.
The interesting part of the novel is just to see how Elanour will react in differently to ordinary circumstances. The cravenness comes off mainly from the author implying through Elanour’s own justifications that Elanour’s viewpoint is wrong. Simply put her justifications seem unconvincing. To put it bluntly, it feels like the author is trying to say, ‘Oh how could anyone enjoy being alone look at this silly childish woman lying to herself.’ Basically even the title implies ‘Elanour Oliphant is fine’ implies that ‘Elanour Oliphant is not fine’ and this could be taken as far as the notion that ‘lonely people are not fine.’ Of course I am sure that if asked about this the author might just simply reply that it’s ‘‘not all’ lonely people’ and conveniently forget to add ‘but many err…actually most.’
The otherwise cynical protagonist almost seems to be out of character often saying silly things about romantic love and fate that one would normally find in a romance novel for women. I suspect that this might be because later in the book the entire notion of romantic love is thrown out of the window in favour of some infantilising Dickensian-never-land-ending (Note to Anglos: I added ‘never-land’ because Americans don’t know what a Dickensian ending is like. Note to Americans: A Dickensian ending is like a Hollywood happy ending except with less kissing and implied sex and more children and relatives, I know it sounds even more awful and rushed).
Simply put, the story constantly begs the question ‘why would any one have a mind of their own and confront another individual instead of seeking easy comfort in a group by going along with the flow of thoughtless conformity?’ and I find this annoying because it is so one-sided towards the side I oppose. Normally books, pop-culture and literary novels in particular venerate the lonely person and many including myself read them as a form of self-affirmation when doubt surrounds you( read me) from all other directions away from yourself(read myself) and your(read my) books. And yet with this book the author manages to bring that outside world into that peaceful cave that this reading by portraying how a (paranoid) lonely person thinks others see him as. Also I may be reading a bit too much into this but I also found a ‘why doesn’t society(i.e. other people) do something (i.e. haemorrhage their money) in order to help these poor lonely helpless people’ message as well. In short, lonely people aren’t helpless and trying to indenture them with ‘help’ is counterproductive and leads to learned helplessness and a misplaced sense of entitlement for other people’s attention.