annihilating the nihilists

an exploration of rage bait and the dissolution of the left

at least one of these things has happened (probably both):

1. the NYT has essentially made an editorial decision to maximize readership and reach through rage farming by publishing incendiary and provocative headlines that demand and encourage the “smugbait” response of “can you believe how stupid these people are?” that is so effective at inducing people to forward content

2. many on the left are falling so rapidly into the implacable gravity well of the wokester/marxist singularity that they are caught in the steep part of an exponential of doubling down of ideological obsession that they must then project upon others in order to avoid realizing this about themselves.

most likely these sorts of missives are balm for the true believers, and self-righeous click bait for those who disagree, a calculated confluence of reach maximization that emerges from the response rates of modern media.

it’s really the only way to get to the endless concateneated cavalcade of dog-whistle taunts that have become the stock in trade of the once august gray lady now turned red in some combination of marxism and possibly embarrassment.

please peruse exhibit a:

but sometimes, even when you know it’s gonna be in the dirt, you just cannot lay off a pitch.

so:

samuel l catson

some useful context on the current zeitgeist:

being sick to death of the incessant politicization of everything and the struggle session brownshirtery of a wokester/marxist cultural incursion and seeking to leave it behind to reclaim a pleasant life without it is not nihilism.

it’s hope for a better way and a better day.

it's optimism.

i can see how this seems like nihilism to the left as it represents the total dismantling of the structures they have built to establish and sustain their own ill deserved power, but the base presumption that this system of civilizational control ever had any right to exist or was in any way a good thing was always flawed.

the dissassembly of tyranny is not destructive; it’s the laying of a foundation for a return to flourishing.

and we're done asking if you care.

one does not negotiate with cancer.

our ask is simple:

all we want is for you to take your hyper-intrusive regime of politics and go away.

leave our lives and stop trying to dominate them.

go be you, just do it with some reasonable modicum of decorum and respect and leave others to do the same.

but you experience the request to leave others alone as “literally worse than murder” and some form of erasure.

your pathology is even worse than faux moralism. you see it as identity, as self. it's who you perceive yourself to be, woven into warp and weft of the utterly externalized identity structures that you have mistaken for lives. you are not people who have ideas; people who have ideas are capable of change. you are people who are their ideas. and so from your perspective, to change ideology is to die.

and that is not a human state, it’s a subsumation by politics. neither change nor flourishing is created in such ways. automnotons are.

and such internal landscapes are cemented in place with profound self-delusion and absence of introspection.

all the intrusion, all the assault on others and the ideological forcing and materialistic takings become so obviously inexcusable that the only way to maintain a belief in one’s own goodness is to deny and project it.

the rapine of endless politicized plunder gets mistaken for a good and just base state of affairs and any resistance to such ravages cast as malign intent and politics.

this is the essence to which such movements rarify.

were you complete humans, you could learn. but you are not. you’re facades for political payload and so instead you keep doubling down on radicalization and projection, alienating ever more of the center that once sympathized with your crybully empathization.

and you are running out of friends, a fact that will only make you more determined to alienate the last few who remain.

you will do this without a trace of irony or self-awareness.

you simply cannot help yourselves or imagine any worldview save your own.

then, in the fine histrionic tradition of the theater kids, you will cast yoursleves at the victims of anyone unwilling to be victimized by you and your jihadi ideologies of aggrievement.

but we’re way past the time when anyone will care.

the nihilsm you feel is your control falling away and the identity you built around it being unpicked.

you will resist this trend and this knowledge.

but it will not sustain your regime or your extrinsically validated senses of self and of place in the world.

a simple ground truth remains:

no reasonable person wants to live in the anxious, agitated, and coercive thief of joy world that you built to elevate your own failings and pathologies as virtue and to demand their worship.

and your 15 minutes are over.