how to slay a magic word cult

and the reason the collapse of woke is going to be far faster and more pervasive than people think.

i always seem to get quite a lot of pushback on my claims that “the woke worm is turning” but i am getting more convinced by the day that this is so and the really steep part of the exponential is coming.

and then the scores can really change.

a basic framework to consider:

people are just deeply, passionately bone weary of woke. it’s been far too much for far too long and just about none of it seems sympathetic, reasonable, or even tolerable anymore.

the reason it was able to persist for so long was ruthless, relentless, and instant cancel culture. speak up, you’re gang tackled off the stage by people screaming “racist,” “sexist,” “privilege,” “phobic,” and “safety.”

your speech is hate and their hate is tolerance.

the whole world was made a safe space for oppressive, dictatorial hallucinations masquerading as world views and exclusion oriented tyranny of the other side doing business as inclusive big love fluffy bunny pluralism.

until this unified edifice started showing cracks, it was very successful in essentially acting like an abusive spouse: coercion, intimidation, physical and emotional abuse, projection, making you feel unsafe while blaming it on you for making them feel unsafe, gaslighting, and endlessly doing to you exactly what they claim you are doing to them and claiming victim status so that when they attack you it’s “see what you made me do?”

this stuff is textbook.

and it unravels the same way.

take it from your kitty godmother:

the picosecond it started being OK to call it out, woke was over.

woke can only survive if it's shielded from criticism. there is no real ethos or ethics there and little in the way of real salients or community. it’s a rage mob of the entitled and stunted making up justifications for waging war on everything that is not them.

the whole world may be deconstructed and attacked except for our chosen salients, the belief set that may not be interrogated.

the whole intersectionalism grievance gang has been an absurdity since day one.

it was a "magic word" cult.

so long as "racist" or "sexist" or "transphobic" was a spell that ended all debate it could survive.

as long as you could scream “you’re making me feel unsafe” and disappear into a cloud of moralistic squid ink where none were allowed to follow or question because “my feels trump all rationality” it could survive.

but any actual examination of its precepts kills it instantly because the whole woke/DEI philosophical complex is based on self-important assumptive clown world nonsense.

it’s not intellectualism and justice, it’s malformed tantrum and dark-carnival misrule.

and its 15 minutes are over.

this interview is both amusing and telling.

it’s also something of a map to the way forward.

give it a watch.

now, elon is an admittedly imperfect champion of free speech and he could have played this considerably better, but still, he’s got a point and he took a stand and this is a useful thing.

“free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like.”

simple idea. basically inarguable. popular speech does not need protection. free speech is to protect that which is not popular because popularity and truth are not the same thing at all and the cure for bad speech is not censorship, it’s more speech.

that which you block and deny just grows in stature. silencing those who disagree with you does not represent strength, it demonstrates weakness.

if you will not allow the speech of others to be heard by those who would choose to listen, why should we not presume it’s because you fear that they will say something true that refutes your preferred narrative?

let everyone have their say and see how the chips land.

and boy does the BBC’s junior cub reporter on the gotchaball grievance beat not like that. what’s funnier is that it seems like he cannot understand the basic ideas.

he immediately retreats to those two classic tropes:

misinformation and hate speech.

he thinks he’s played a trump card and spoken the magic word but instead he’s just cut himself off at the knees.

magic words only work if others believe in them and these words are hilariously tired and hackneyed to the point of signification so threadbare you can see right through it.

all one need do is reject the premise and there is no foe left, just 3 kids standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat to try to get into a movie (minus the cuteness.)

watching BBC boyo try to grapple with the “so who decides what is misinformation?” questions was like watching a divide by 0 error.

it sort of seemed like he had never even considered this and that he inhabits a world and a canon where “truth” is just known and “misinformation” is anything that disagrees.

and i suspect that’s because he does.

he’s known nothing but “narrative” and he seems unable to imagine that it might be different than truth.

but it is. i wish elon had really driven that home.

what i would have asked is:

“well, the greatest source of misinformation around covid was governments. they said safe and effective. they said vaccines stopped the spread and were a dead end for the virus. they said 2 weeks to flatten the curve. it was all lies and they either knew it or had no idea what they were saying. so just what "misinformation" are we culling here and how is one to respond to such inaccuracies if speech is proscribed?”

because there’s the rub, no?

the cure for public policy disinformation was actual information and the elevation of the debate by those who had been correct but had been prevented from making their case.

simple truth:

that which cannot be challenged cannot be trusted.

you cannot, a priori, know what “disinformation” is before the debate takes place. science does not start from “facts” and then eliminate all else from discussion. it starts from competing hypotheses and methods and lines of argument and it works forward toward “facts” by open, adversarial engagement.

theoretically, so too does journalism.

but it’s clear that’s mostly gone.

and it’s clear that these ersatz journos do not want it back because they prefer the world this way and probably cannot function were it not so. they are simply not equipped.

and so the response is predictable, but the effects veer into hilarity because they possess no tools suitable to the task.

our correspondent seems to think only in narrative as though it were gospel and of how to defend it. the idea of evidence and marshalled argument from first principles seems conspicuously absent.

he’s just lost and starts trying to plead safety and that old chestnut “hate speech.”

and this is where it really surpasses funny into just plain sad.

he claims to have experienced more “hate speech” on twitter but when pressed over and over cannot provide a single example except for some vague muttering about “mildly sexist” etc. then he retreats to “well, i don’t really use twitter” then “well, not lately” and cannot then explain how he knows about this “rise in hate.”

it’s a sort of wheel spinning desperate attempt to backpedal getting rugpulled on more magic word failure and appeal to axiomatic belief.

it was like watching a bird hit a windowpane.

this is how you know you have become a narrative drone.

“well, others claim…” is not much of an argument.

he’s obviously just never been challenged on any of this because the magic words and accepted premises worked.

really stop and think about that.

imagine being a BBC reporter and rising to the level of interviewing figures of global news and having no idea that the world outside your echo chamber exists or that it might demand standards higher than trying to use accusatory epithets and appeals to amorphous “isms” and persecution fantasies as smoke-bombs to hide shoddy thinking and presumption.

imagine having no idea that someone might ask for actual evidence.

how insular and devoid of dissent must your circle be?

this is what we’re up against amigos. it’s neither smart nor informed, it’s just convinced.

the reason they fear free speech so much is that they know they cannot survive it.

they wither and disintegrate out here.

the whole of their philosophy and practice is to assume that saying “racist” or “experts say that’s misinformation” will carry the day because no one is allowed to challenge it.

how many woke warriors have any argument at all when pressed?

just about none.

the fierce shrieking about your “privilege” is a dying tribe seeking to preserve its own from being revoked.

get ready for quite the shrill frackas, because this issue is existential for them.

and they know it.

your free speech is their swansong.

those who cannot compete in a marketplace of ideas will always seek to shut the marketplace down.

but the side of censorship is never the side of civilization.

and this fight is already over.

once the questions are askable and asked, the outcome is certain.

woke cannot respond because it never made sense.

so keep asking.

pry the door open further, move the overton window, and reject the premise that these magic words command respect and silence debate.

push back and you’ll find there was never really anything there.

you can quote your kitty godmother: