the ultra-right-wing movement which has currently seized hold of U.S. politics and discourse and has been driving it relentlessly rightward since 1980 and the illegitimate Presidency of Ronald Reagan has a paradoxical character that's made it very difficult to talk about in a concise fashion. That's partly through deliberate strategems: right-wing figures make themselves deliberately as blurry as possible, constantly changing their political labels and finding new "theories" and "philosophies" behind which to disguise their own beliefs, which are apt to be in constant ferment and unsettled. The pose is always that these people are still undecided somehow, still available for persuasion, and the difficulty with liberal and leftist ideas (so they say) is that they're never persuasive.

but in a genuine sense the entire movement is rudderless, bereft of unifying ideas and therefore reliant for cohesion on mutual hatreds rather than positive beliefs. every person in the coalition thinks of themselves as a lonely truth-teller, the one person who has been granted true political vision, and therefore they don't work well in groups. the Internet has been a godsend to their sort of politics, because it furnishes a medium that's both very broad and available almost anywhere in the country with the right equipment, but also isolating and tailored to the needs of people who want all their socializing to happen at a long distance. each of these persons, when quizzed, can truthfully claim to be part of no organized movement. "Gosh, me?? A 'fascit' or whatever it was you called me? I'm just an independent truth-teller, politically homeless, a rebel against conventions, etc."

there's an element of self-protection in that, of course. claiming to be independent and "heterodox" isn't just self-flattery, it's also safer than belonging to groups and causes. every right-wing influencer of note has probably used the "I'm just an entertainer uwu" excuse at least once. again, the Internet is of immense value here, because it allows for right-wing celebrities to ditch their own fandoms at a moment's notice, claiming that they've merely attracted a rowdy crowd and they're not responsible for them. but also, it's partly genuine. each person in the movement, whether they're relatively big and famous like (say) Charles Murray or just an insignificant admirer with a Twitter account, feels like they ought to be in charge and that their fellow reactionaries, while good and sound fellows on the issues that matter, are in fact hopelessly wrong and heretical about something.

each of them is a potential leader. but each of them is also a FAILED leader—that's important. people sink to this level because they've had their illusions crushed so now they need bigger illusions, grander ones, in order to keep their egos from collapsing. Charles Murray probably still feels, really and truly, like they've been robbed of a Nobel Prize by carping hypocritical liberals. Elon Musk knows deep down inside that all his "success" is fake, almost entirely the work of others, and thus he must pretend he's the restorer of a racially purified Roman Empire or whatever. they have both the grandest possible aspirations and a fearful ignorance of all the skills and abilities that would enable them to carry their aspirations through.

they must, therefore, always look to someone greater. the only way they can feel like leaders themselves is if they've got a bigger leader behind them. even a coward can fight if they think they've got a threat in front of them and a massive wall behind them, preventing them from running away and therefore leaving them no choice but self-defence.

and thus we get a mechanism for self-organization. smaller failed leaders cluster around bigger failed leaders, who are themselves always seeking someone to back them up. the degree to which these persons can obtain some backup—sponsorship for example, the way that murky creditors sponsor Elon Musk and Harlan Crow sponsors Charles Murray—determines how well they can function as temporary or provision leaders, stable enough to gain a crowd of adherents, and of course a large enough crowd of adherents is itself a source of stability. large groups of people, even rowdy mobs with little cohesion, have a tendency to stick together by a sort of human Van der Waals force, a general tendency for human beings to attract each other's company.

and that, I think, is roughly how you get the sort of paradoxical accidental conspiracies that prevail in the right wing. conventional U.S. political journalism hasn't really caught up with the fact that these people and groups are working towards common goals even if they're only loosely organized. money and a rather small collection of mutual concerns keeps them all going in the same direction. is it "conspiracy" in any way that a U.S. prosecutor or judge would reckon conspiracies? honestly...I don't know. I feel like the law is lagging well behind political reality.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I mean...let's be honest here. eggbug's been seen around some pretty shady characters ~Chara

so I think I know why this only roused mild interest: I didn't really think it through at the time, simple as that. my intent was unclear and it's still unclear. what was I even trying to say? I admit that I've never felt entirely at home on Cohost, partly because of seeing that other people (especially Black and other marginalized users) were having a rough time, but more because I've never felt at home anywhere on line. I've gotten used to feeling detached, like I'm condemned to wander so I'd better get used to it. but I don't feel like it's fair to pin that sense of detached skepticism on eggbug.

I will say this about eggbug, though, in general. I think there's an inherent danger in any cutesy twee mascot for a commercial enterprise. Cohost was a business after all—for now, it's the only way to do anything sizeable in the United States, at least so far as I'm aware, without getting in trouble with the law—which means that eggbug has the nature of a corporate mascot, albeit a benign and charming one. But where's the line? When does "cute mascot" become "fake happy mask over a sinister scheme"? The Mickey Mouse line, if you like, or the Kyubey line. Curiously I think Toby Fox in Deltarune might be deliberately teasing this line with Ralsei, who seems both beloved and slightly evil, like he really might pull a gun on you at any moment.

~Chara of Pnictogen

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

Silly question, right? U.S. Atheists might scoff and say God (meaning the Christian God in this context, for American atheists generally don't think further than that) never existed in the first place so the question is moot—and yet I daresay it's atheists who tend not to think about the logical implications of their own statements. If God never existed then why do so many human beings feel as if God exists? Atheists tend not to understand that Christian faith isn't merely an outrageous assertion shouted out in defiance of the void. Christians (some of them anyway) believe that they have empirical evidence of their faith: they think they've seen faith rewarded, and therefore have more reason to believe. There may be irreligious reasons for this but no atheist I've run into seems very interested in them, not in any serious or analytical way. Rationalbro discourse on religious belief is mired in pseudoscientific chatter about evopsych and "memetics"; the attitude prevails that because religion isn't "real" (even though plainly it is, even if gods aren't) there's no point in talking accurately about it.

There must exist some physical entity that is equivalent to "God", not as an omniscient and omnipotent creator of everything, but as a thing that motivates belief. Even if God is merely a thought, thoughts ought to be explainable in material and physical terms, for thoughts are hosted on physical beings. If God is a "meme" then what is a meme, exactly? Every scrap of writing I've ever seen on memetics takes zero interest in the underlying mechanics of memetic existence. They take "meme" on Dawkins's authority, I would guess, and therefore feel safe in speculative blithering about psychological and social implications (in spite of their profound ignorance of both psychology and sociology.) What is it, exactly, that compels the human phenomenon known as belief on faith—belief without visible reason?

"It's irrational, it's not important," seems to be the general answer offered by U.S. intellectuals. American (and "Western") authorities have plunged down a deep rabbit hole—one that, ironically, C. S. Lewis predicted would happen in his monograph The Abolition of Man, and wrote into a fictional novel called That Hideous Strength. Science and academia, Lewis feared, in search of perfect "objectivity", would discard the idea that human emotions were meaningful, and thus discard morality and ethics as well. If pain itself is meaningless then there's no objection to hurting people as long as inflicting pain can be construed as "rational" and "objective". And this is indeed what has happened. Jack Lewis, on this point anyway, was entirely correct.

Long story short, there's been—at least in those levels of U.S. academia which gain access to the popular press and prestige—no serious inquiry into what "God" is, not as a spiritual or metaphysical entity but as a human phenomenon. Needless to say, the fanatical and hypocritical Christians scattered throughout American professional life have probably been knocking everyone away from studying this, for their own safety: their "faith" is not one that withstands scrutiny of any sort, much less intellectual analysis, so they've been methodically spoiling and spreading chaos through intellectual disciplines that they wish to regard as theirs for protective reasons: psychology and psychiatry especially, but also philosophy, evolutionary biology, history, and many others.

Obviously belief in the Christian God is not wholly dead but I sense that there's a massive collapse in general Christian faith incoming. Christianity in general, as a source of public influence and political pressure at least, has been shrivelling up for the last several decades, if not the last few centuries, though lately the process seems to be considerably accelerated. (Acceleration is intrinsically good, as we know. /s) The 1960s and 1970s led to a definite recrystallization of U.S. Christianity around purely secular values, especially anti-Black bigotry and other such collective hatreds. The U.S. media, conditioned into reflexive deference to Christians, have refused to put two and two together when it comes to the obviously political and secular nature of the Christians who dominate Republican politics, maybe because deep down the U.S. media doesn't want to accept the profound implication, i.e. that a huge mass of purported Christians, people with an extraordinary amount of power in the United States, has in fact lost their faith and won't publicly admit it. To them, I suspect, God is dead, though they're in denial about it.

~Chara of Pnictogen