free for me but not for thee

setting the sacred wolves to prey upon the people

i am a free speech absolutist. i think we ought to all be free to speak as we feel and as we believe and thereby gather audiences and consequences as befit our utterances. i feel the same way about association. you should, as a private actor, be able to associate or refuse to do so with anyone you like for any reason you chose or no reason at all. i may judge you as a person for decisions you make along these lines, but i will, at the same time, defend your right to make them.

once, this was hardly a rare belief or exotic concept. it was called “a principled stance on individual liberty” and it underpinned the basis for a republic in which the rights of the individual stood paramount to the dictates of the state and in which the negative rights to self-determination stood tall and rendered moot and untenable the idea of what have come to be called “positive rights” which are, of course, not really rights at all but rather entitlements that must, of necessity, rest upon a basis of coercion for if you have a “right” to healthcare and no one wishes to provide or pay for it of their own free will, then clearly, someone must be compelled if you are to have it.

this basis for the idea of “compulsion based justice” ran riot through the “progressives” and has essentially eaten any virtue once encapsulated in their ideas and bent their movement into a truly nasty form of self-justification for tyranny. it’s all rather obvious when one really looks at it. it’s just economic law.

part and parcel to this deviation from self-awareness and from any form of defensible ethics or agency was the idea of “moral relativism” whereby there was no objective virtue or honor or justice but only competing subjective views thereof none of which could be in any meaningful way claimed to be superior to any other or to possess any greater claim to rightness or goodness.

leaving aside the obvious hilarity of self-abnegation arising from the simple idea that this means that one could simply say “why yes, there is objective morality!” and under a subjectivist/relativist construct claim it to have every bit as much validity as the underpinnings of moral relativism itself and the obvious hoax/parlor game that makes this whole idea out to be, moral relativism combined with the idea of positive rights is also a clear and obvious race to the bottom. consider:

if any ethos is as valid as any other and at the same time we accept the idea that it is good and right to allow one group to force another to perform acts that it would not of its free choice undertake, what kind of moralities are we going to select for once we grant them the power to use the state to enforce by threat of violence those “rights” that they have assigned to themselves?

yup: needy, aggressive, grabby fabulists who demand much and give nothing. this constitutes a morality for vandals, for wreckers, for the desperately damaged who seek status not by achievement but through conjured attestations of aggrievement.

that last point becomes a pivot, for in a morally relative system, the only real way to prove status or strength of claim is, in fact, aggrievement. i cannot say “my ethics are better than yours” as objective demonstration of such has been prohibited. but i can say “you oppressed me” or “you done me wrong” and then demand redress and lay claim to moral superiority as “victim.” this is how one opens and looses as pestilence upon the world the pandora’s box of structural “ism’s” from race, gender, sexual orientation, bizarre fetish, or egregious ethical special pleading by which literally anyone can be attacked and anything be demanded.

this is dissolution. it’s madness. it is the literal opposite of civilization and the elevation of the worst and most damaged antisocial cluster B denizens to some form of purported priesthood of diversity.

it’s a grotesque mockery of ethics and of humanity.

and as many are starting to wake up and see, it’s very much the world we’ve been trying to live in.

it’s also self-refuting stupidity.

covid feels like it was some sort of watershed, the great intrusion and disruption that tore open institutions and societal structure by pushing everything too far too fast and eliciting far too much “quiet part” to be not only said aloud but screamed from mountaintops and proclaimed as visionary future. eyes were opened. pills were reddened. lions awakened.

this set an interesting table which is now increasingly being swept clear by the twist in the road of hamas, israel, and the grand ideological conflagration it seems to be evoking as truly surprising numbers of academics side with the brutal and repressive regimes that would never allow anyone close to a US college student with bespoke pronouns and a gender identity that takes 20 minutes to explain even to one well versed in such mysteries to coexist anywhere near them. one of the least tolerant, least free, and most misogynist cultures on earth is being paraded as an avatar of freedom fighting. the rights of those who would take the rights of others are set as sacrosanct.

and this is how you know a movement has utterly lost its way and become a rabid, self-deluding, self-consuming thing. these people literally can no longer tell up from down or right from wrong. it’s just rage and entitlement justifying entitled outrage.

these ersatz justice warriors seem hilariously befuddled that anyone could take issue with their support of calls for violence and genocide. and doing that in front of congress is truly a circus worthy of the coliseum. you could not buy educational entertainment this poignant.

but, it’s really pretty obvious when you look at it and, of course, this was all always only going to go one way.

the richness of the irony of the gang that spent 10 years calling words “violence” and violence “peaceful protest” truly beggars belief and it has reached a crescendo of hypocrisy that not even it can withstand.

i actually think real universities or any private agency so long as it is not a ward of or dictated to by the state (a stricture which clearly puts most current universities on very shaky ground) ought to be able to say what they like and erect and enforce such community standards as they find appropriate, but standards of sanity must be applied to all and the world is going to wind up judging academia by them.

the spectacle of the same universities that have spent 3 years calling free speech “hate speech” around fairly neutral ideas like elections or epidemiology or medicine suddenly lining up to defend some truly hateful speech about terrorism through murder, rape, and dismemberment of peaceful people constituting “permissible protest” and characterizing the support of such ideologies as “academic inquiry” seems to be snapping something. it’s the exponential doubling too far that makes the disease obvious and elicits a societal immune response. academia as pathogen has snapped into focus and no longer appears a cute game for the parlor or the academy. this instant pivot to the very ideas of freedom these selfsame stentorians shrilly censored for 3 years has laid their ethical bankruptcy plain.

this is neither equity nor inclusion. it’s privilege in the purest etymological sense of “private law” where standards exist only to be unevenly applied and used for advantage, not shared with or even tolerated among “others.” it is not equality. it’s aristocracy.

and so we come to this:

"free for me but not for thee" is the perfect avatar of the internal inversion of modern "progressive pluralism."

this movement has become everything it purports to hate:

bigoted, illiberal, narrow minded, oppressive, and prejudiced

it's tyranny of the other side masquerading as tolerance.

it places no actual value on inclusion or acceptance or freedom but rather seeks to grasp and defend its own narrow privilege to dictate and vilify all save itself. this is the very definition of moral bankruptcy.

it has become the calculated normalization of outrageous conduct and imposition professing to be some twisted form of empathically derived "justice" for "the marginalized" which, in reality is the elevation of the awful and predatory to the position of "sacred wolf" that may be neither criticized nor resisted but rather forcibly allowed and required to walk among and to prey upon us.

the goal is not “equity” but rather a despicable form of unearned privilege bestowed upon the worst for acting badly. in final form, these become invading barbarians who demand not only to thrash and conquer you but then require that you pay them obeisance and thank them for having done so.

it’s some sort of divine madness cult where pathology and viciousness have been mistaken for virtue and empathy.

and at a certain point, any degree of normalcy and individual agency and rights simply cannot coexist beside it. this is a collision course and someone is going to have to get run off the road.

no one who inhabits a healthy society would even get this joke

everyone has abandoned belief and conscience in favor of cheap gotchaball tactics and will flip to embrace that which they just finished excoriating the picosecond it becomes a position of convenience.

women’s groups, the UN, and the red cross stand mum as outlandish war crimes and torture are paraded on the internet as “protest.” the parallels to politicos (and even the ADL who now wraps itself in such purported righteousness) standing in front of cities burning in “peaceful protest” are difficult to ignore, but the wild abandoning of all precept and principle among “the intellectuals” stands even more so.

the astonishing volte face of the same “believe her” universities who raged about even inappropriate or unwelcome comments being sexual assault suddenly pimping and preening for actual violent rape, torture, and murder as some sort of tool of statecraft or the expression of the aspirations of a people makes it painfully clear that, at core, these people believe nothing. they are as immoral as they are insane and this incessant idea that anything that is “anti-western civilization” is somehow grand, noble, and proper has set them up in alliance with many of the worst and most damaging ideas ever conceived by man. they are the un-enlightenment, a new dark age that has mistaken itself for rome.

at a certain point, anything evincing even glimmers of sanity or discernment gets branded “far right” and “hateful” and savage violence and opprobrium is unleashed upon it in defense of, uh, savage violence and opprobrium.

yeah.

this starts to get pretty stupid pretty fast.

this is also the seed of its own undoing and it’s why this is all about to get swept off the table. they are well into eating their own and each new rarefication of ideological purity and ejaculatory outrage keeps pushing the alleged line of “far right” ever leftward and dragging the overton window with it. they are running out of allies and the absolute phantasmagoric distortion of their ever intensifying hallucination has lost all internal coherence.

this is not civilization.

this is not respect.

this is not pluralism nor freedom nor rights.

these are actual crazy people driving themselves ever madder and trying to take everyone else with them.

and their 15 minutes are over.