The Pnictogen Wing

{Four} Never trust anyone who's seen combat and didn't come out of it anti-war.

I cannot fucking STAND how all the fascist fanboys of Greece and Rome somehow forget that just about every scrap of memorable classical literature that had anything to say about war was uniform in its condemnation of it. How the fuck V. D. Hanson learned from Thucydides the lesson that "yeah we should try that military hegemony stuff again" is just...what is wrong with you, Victor?? ~Chara

I have wasted altogether too many years of my life learning to get used to how right-wing gasbags and their fans talk about...everything. I really hope that this is a skill that might have practical uses—and maybe it has at least taught me how to be more even-tempered overall, because the purpose of right-wing gasbags is to inflame the emotions. The best of them achieve an almost perfect separation of form from function: while talking the most arrant sentimental drivel they mimic the dry professional mannerisms of Oxford dons lecturing on art history, and this excites adulation in their fans and outrage from honest academics. 95% of right-wing bloviation, at least, consists merely in schooling oneself to be snobbish and aloof and oblique to the point of being impossible to understand except by the initiate. They love to cite each others' work as if they were quoting Isaac Newton or Thucydides.

And they all feel, so very very strongly. It's honestly all they have to offer, despite their pantomime of intellectual activity and rational discourse: what matters most in right-wing bloviation is feelings. They wish at all times to convey the impression of a mild-mannered scholar being suddenly and abruptly jolted into awareness of tremendous injustices, and therefore to be excused for any indelicacy or sloppiness of rhetoric. The fact that these people have spent their entire lives being abruptly jolted into outrages, declaiming repetitively in one column after another, seems to escape everyone's notice. They've done it so often they probably don't know they're doing it any more, no matter how trivial the pretext for their latest version of O tempora! O mores!

I would guess that all of them have some sort of grand origin story, too. I only know this in any detail for a couple of the right-wing pundits. James Lindsay, the infamous "ConceptualJames" on Twitter, was supposedly "radicalized" into fascist noisemaking because as a Ph.D. mathematician (supposedly) he was so outraged by the nonsensical blithering of academic theorists that he planted obvious fakes into a variety of low-rent academic publications who'll take just about anything without scrutiny, and that "proved" of course that feminism &c. are nonsense. (His career now consists of asserting that Marxism is gnosticism, or something.) Bret Weinstein, the lesser sibling to better-known fascist ideologue Eric R. Weinstein and currently leading a charge to "Rescue the Republic", was a teacher at Evergreen State College here in my home state of Washington, a school with a rather poor reputation for its loosey-goosey experimental methods. Bret was too bigoted to keep the job, got sacked, and then constructed a whole Ignatius V. Reilly narrative about how Evergreen was the evil nexus of Woke Education or something. Charles Murray's story is pretty well known because popular biology writer Stephen Jay Gould (who knew Jeffrey Epstein, by the way...worrisome, that) and other biologists tore his "Bell Curve" work to shreds, whereupon Murray slunk into semi-hiding behind a number of think-tank jobs.

All of these people, to the last person I would guess, are professional failures in some way. That's where academic cranks usually come from. There might be a few who are truly self-invented, rising up from nowhere, but most have credentials of some sort, and have gotten themselves busted out of legitimate jobs and professions, so now they subsist on "wingnut welfare", i.e. the massive streams and smaller rivulets of cash always trickling down from unseen corporate benefactors and flowing into a variety of propaganda institutions and powerful "influencers" and friendly corporations. They lean doublethinkfully on their credentials too: while lampooning and mocking mainstream academia as hopelessly corrupted by "cultural Marxism" and whatnot, gleefully claiming that college education is now worthless, they nevertheless pretend that somehow their degrees are proof of excellence. Christians are especially good at this game, for they always regard themselves as sui generis within organizations that (in their view) ought to be grateful for their presence.

We have not mastered the art of approaching these people. Mono can knock them to the ground easily enough (horses, you know, they're pretty BIG) but they get back up again. One of our headmates is offering their services! His name is Peter—you may have heard of him—and in another life he once ruled the known world.

~Chara of Pnictogen

to which I'll only add this: it's impossible simply to wall this stuff off and pretend it doesn't exist, because the perpetrators KNOW they're being treated in this fashion and they will do everything they can think of to defeat such passive measures. it's an irrational compulsion with them, a memetic compulsion: they MUST infect other minds with their crap, and knowing that people try to hide from them rouses them to an insane pitch of dedication. they really do think they're being "censored".

it's not enough just to hide and run ~Chara

there was a flurry of headlines some while ago about Elon Musk flirting with "cultural Christianity". I didn't investigate it more than cursorily but at a glance, it looked like a public-relations stunt aimed at right-wing and Christian publications. "Elon Musk's Walk with Jesus", according the Wall Street Journal, was surely a cynical ploy for sympathy and totally insincere—except that Musk occupies a world in which even the faintest stirrings and glimmers of belief are taken very seriously indeed. everyone's always lying in the world of money and business and technology, especially about their own adherence to high and lofty abstractions like humanity or God. even in the middle of lying about Jesus, Elon Musk probably felt some wistful hope that maybe it could be true.

salesmanship, selling oneself and one's racket to others, has always felt a bit like being a "whisky priest" or travelling preacher. you're not just selling vinyl siding for houses or lightning-rods (q.v. Something Wicked This Way Comes) or life insurance or encyclopaedias, or Bibles for that matter. you're selling the future! you're selling happiness, security, contentment, safety, all the good and heavenly things. the salesperson can't be consciously lying the whole time they're doing that, no matter how ridiculous the pitch—no human being is actually good at sustaining a fully conscious lie. to keep up elaborate and ongoing lies, we have to make ourselves believe that maybe we're telling the truth, in some oblique or symbolic way, or in a way that's not true now but will become true. Elon Musk's always lying, but surely he's also telling himself that he's within the bounds of reasonable probability. after all, he's Elon Musk! he can make anything come true, with enough determination.

as a result, it's quite possible that Elon Musk has some weak stirrings of belief in something grander and greater than himself, something truly humbling, even though his actions constantly tell us about his avarice and self-absorption. unfortunately he's not surrounded by people with a sincere belief in anything. the more secular of the Elon Musk crowd of ubergeeks and grifters tend to have very simple-minded beliefs in vague abstractions. Optimism! Acceleration! The Singularity! then there are the people who seem to worship the Machine in various guises, like "AGI" and "The Simulation". but the people with the best defined beliefs, the ones who seem to be getting hold of Elon Musk's imagination, are the "cultural Christians". that's unfortunate, because I'm pretty sure that "cultural Christianity" is about 90% antisemitism.

a grotesque irony about Christianity in the extremity of its social decay is that the bigotries have become its longest-lasting traditions. antisemitism is basically as old as Christianity—St. Paul set the tone there—and it's given Christianity a kind of negative definition of itself. "what does it mean to be a Christian? it means I'm not one of those [redacted]." Christianity has also folded many other bigotries into itself, particularly the intense misogyny it inherited from the Greek and Roman worlds. consequently "cultural Christianity" has become extremely nasty as it devolves, obsessed with striking a comically hypermasculine pose of toughness, bluster, microaggression, and social posturing. to be "culturally Christian" is to be a winner, by default, in the standard bigot's way. it's rather too easy to imagine Elon Musk and other nerds with a weak self-image being drawn to that "we won history" energy of the cultural Christians.

It's funny how the "New Atheists" ended up believing their own bullshit, you could say, because they've stoked interest in this "cultural Christianity" themselves. Richard Dawkins gets sentimental about church bells while vomiting up Islamophobic bile (which itself serves as a socially acceptable proxy for antisemitism, the older and more durable hatred in Christian culture.) In earlier decades I was irritated with how obnoxious atheists of the Dawkins sort refused to see anything in Christianity (and by extension all "religion", of which atheists tend to be appallingly ignorant) than a cynical tool for social manipulation. there's a kind of atheist fable about why religions and churches exist in the first place: in their view, it's merely charismatic people finding out they can whip the sheeple into line with scary tales of divine retribution. now though they seem to believe that's just what society needs! the people really ARE "sheeple" who need to be driven about, and maybe "cultural Christianity" is just the ticket.

so Elon Musk surely wants mostly this, a handy way to manipulate people, but one that also offers the surcease of righteousness. perhaps Musk feels guilty about being a screaming abusive tyrant—the only way he can get anyone to do anything these days, one suspects. I'm not sure where I'm going with this chat now. maybe the answer is giving Musk what he wants!

...just, not the way he expects. but that's how it is with gods.

~Chara of Pnictogen