#Enlightenment values

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson

Published: Jun 10, 2024

There’s a sense that the liberal order is eroding.

What do we mean by that? By “liberal order” we mean three things: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and epistemic liberalism.

Politically, it’s tough to shake the sense that we’re drifting away from our liberal roots. Fringes on both sides are rejecting the liberal principle that all human beings are created equal and that our differences are dwarfed by our shared humanity. On the left, prominent activists are endorsing the idea that people with different immutable characteristics (race, gender, etc.) have different intrinsic worth. For instance, in 2021, Yale University’s Child Study Center hosted a psychiatrist who gave a speech titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she compared white people to “a demented violent predator who thinks they are a saint or a superhero.” In response to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, Yale professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Across the political aisle, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams called black Americans a “hate group” whom white Americans should “get the hell away from.”

If a core component of political liberalism is that all human beings are created equal, then many prominent voices are pushing us rapidly toward an illiberal worldview where one’s worth is determined by immutable characteristics. 

Increasingly, members of both parties seek to change liberal institutions to lock the opposition out of power. Their apparent goal is to undermine a key outcome of political liberalism: a peaceful and regular transfer of power between large and well-represented factions. On the right, prominent Republicans have refused to concede Trump’s loss in 2020, and many are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election should Trump lose again. “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said in response to repeated questions about whether or not he would accept the election results. On the left, prominent Democrats advocate for abolishing the Electoral College, partly on the grounds that it favors Republicans; and for splitting California into multiple states to gain more blue Senate seats. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN), among others, have called for expanding the Supreme Court explicitly so they can pack it with Democrats.

This disdain for democratic norms isn’t limited to political elites on right or left; it is permeating the general populace. According to a 2023 poll, only 54 percent of young Americans (aged 18-29) agree with the statement, “Democracy is the greatest form of government.”

Economic liberalism is also under attack. In 2022, Pew found that only 57 percent of the public had a favorable view of capitalism. Those numbers are even worse among young Americans; only 40 percent among those aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism. By contrast, 44 percent of the same age group reported having a positive view of socialism. Faced with the choice of which system we should live under, it’s unclear whether young Americans would prefer economic liberalism over the command-and-control systems of socialism or communism. And while young people typically hold more left-of-center views and often become more conservative as they age, the intensity of young peoples’ opposition to capitalism should not be discounted. From 2010 to 2018, a separate Gallup poll found that the number of young Americans (aged 18-29) with a positive view of capitalism dropped by 23 percent. 

Epistemic liberalism is on the ropes too. As the Harper’s Letter warned, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” In recent years, even prominent intellectuals have been terrified of being canceled for daring to write outside of the lines set by a new and predominantly left-wing orthodoxy, adversely affecting out discourse. Again, this disdain for liberalism is more acute among young people: a 2019 survey found that 41 percent of young Americans didn’t believe that the First Amendment should protect hate speech. Furthermore, a full majority (51 percent) of college students considered it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”

As Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge, a necessary precondition of epistemic liberalism is that everyone should be allowed to speak freely, a precondition increasingly unmet in recent years.

In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) and Özlem Sensoy even challenge the foundation of epistemic liberalism itself: the scientific method. This method mandates that hypotheses be tested against reality before acceptance. “Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed infallibility of scientific method,” they write “and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.” Of course, once we jettison the principle that ideas should be tested by holding them up to reality, all we have left are mythologies and accusations. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was giving us the scientific tools to more accurately understand the world, but those tools—like other facets of liberalism—are increasingly under attack.

So, what went wrong? Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, harbor such disdain for our liberal order? Why have we seen the rise of widespread social censorship, and why do books telling us that not all humans are created equal become mega-bestsellers? We believe a key reason is that too many proponents of the liberal order (ourselves included) have failed to defend our ideals vigorously. In the face of our complacency, a small but impassioned minority intent on dismantling the pillars of liberalism has been gaining ground, both within institutions and within the hearts and minds of the younger generation.

Why haven’t many of us stood up for our ideas? We posit two reasons. First, there is a sense of complacency: a lot of us look at illiberalism and think, “It can't happen here.” The United States was founded as an essentially liberal country. We were the first country to really seek to embody Enlightenment ideals (however imperfectly) from our birth. Throughout our 250-year history, despite fluctuating levels of government intervention in Americans' social and economic lives, we have never lost our political, economic, or epistemological liberal foundations. This long track record of resilience has led many of us to overlook the rising threat of illiberal ideals, assuming our liberal system is too robust to be torn down.

Adding to this complacency is the fact that many threats to our liberal social contract are largely invisible to those outside educational or academic circles. Cloaked in the guise of combating racism, Critical Race Theory takes aim at the liberal order; however, most people who haven’t been inside the halls of a university in the last 10 or so years may not be aware of this aspect. Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and others—generally opposes Enlightenment thinking, but its arguments are wrapped in jargon and mostly live in academic papers. For example, the book Is Everyone Really Equal? criticizes political, economic, and epistemic liberalism, but it’s not a mainstream bestseller; instead, it’s a widely-used textbook for prospective teachers. What begins in the academy often seeps out into schools and eventually permeates the broader society, and many teachers and professors of these ideologies explicitly describe themselves as activists or as scholar-activists whose goal is to turn the next generation onto these ideas. The threat is real, but the more anti-liberal facets of these ideologies aren’t exactly being shouted by CNN, which makes it easy to miss.

Second, as humans, we often abandon our ideals in the face of social pressure. Consider an organization consisting of ten people: one progressive and nine moderates. In 2020, each member starts to hear about Black Lives Matter (BLM). The progressive enthusiastically supports BLM, and loudly encourages his colleagues to do the same. What happens next illustrates how prone we are to jettison our ideals if doing so brings social rewards.

The first moderate faces a choice. He could thoroughly research BLM by investigating police violence nationwide, examining the evidence of systemic racism or system-wide equality, exploring BLM’s proposed program and what they actually advocate for, and making an informed decision about whether or not he supports the organization. But that’s a lot of work for not a lot of return. After all, his job doesn’t require that he understand BLM; the only immediate consequence is his colleague’s opinion of him. Consequently, he engages in what Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls “substitution.” As Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” For example, when participants were asked how much money Exxon should pay for nets to prevent birds from drowning in oil ponds, they did not perform an economic calculation. Instead, what drove their decision-making process was emotion: “the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil.”

Thus, the moderate engages in substitution. Instead of tackling the complex and difficult question “What do I think of BLM?” he asks himself an easier but more emotional question: “How much do I care about black people?” For any decent person, the answer is “quite a lot”—and so he signs on with his progressive colleague. The fact that he’s now supporting an illiberal ideology—one of BLM’s co-founders said in 2019 that “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society"—never occurs to him.

When the next moderate is asked the same question about whether he supports BLM, he has the same incentive as his colleague to engage in substitution, but with added social pressure: now two of his nine coworkers support BLM, and he risks losing social capital if he does not. As humans, we are social animals. Sociologist Brooke Harrington explains that we often value others’ perception of us more than our own survival, as social ostracism in our distant past often meant death anyway. As she puts it, “social death is more frightening than physical death.” And so, motivated by the social rewards for supporting BLM and the fear of social punishment if he does not, one coworker after another agrees to support BLM.

Adding to our social calculus is the fact that we all want to be seen as (and, even more importantly, see ourselves as) empathetic. In the example of BLM, we don’t want to be perceived as racists. If this means going along with an organization that says that police “cannot [be] reform[ed]” because they were “born out of slave patrols,” then that’s a small price to pay. This same desire to be seen as empathetic (again, especially by ourselves) holds when we are called to cancel a professor for saying something insensitive, or to condemn cultural appropriation, or to read and praise books and articles claiming that liberalism has failed marginalized people and that a new, totalitarian system is necessary for their salvation.

But why shouldn’t we be complacent? Why shouldn’t we go along to get along, and let our values bend here and there so we can fit in with the new illiberal crowd? One reason is that the stakes are no longer trivial. There is nothing magical about the liberal order that guarantees it will always triumph. History shows us that liberalism can give way to totalitarianism, as it did in Nazi Germany; or to empire, as in ancient Rome. In England, new rules regulate what people are allowed to say, with citizens facing fines or imprisonment for saying something the political establishment does not like. In Canada, a new bill supported by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would criminalize speech that those in power consider hateful. The United States is not immune to these dangers. Our Constitution alone is not a sufficient defense, because laws are downstream from culture. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be interpreted by illiberal justices (and have been in the 20th century); and when this happens, our rights can erode very rapidly indeed. Our freedom is sustained not by our geography or even our founding documents, but by our willingness to fight for liberalism—to defend it in the court of public opinion.

If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, that is what it will take. We must find the courage to stand up for our ideals—to speak and act based on principle alone. We must be open to new evidence that might change our views, but at the same time resist having our minds changed for us. We must prioritize truth over popular opinion.

In essence, we must think and act more like August Landmesser.

[ Source: The Lone German Man Who Refused to Give Hitler the Nazi Salute (businessinsider.com) ]

--

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

==

Whatever its flaws, every alternative to liberalism is a nightmare.

[heavenly-garden]

I learned a valuable lesson recently, one as a Christian I need to remember and keep close to my heart because I began to lose sight of what really matters. I learned yesterday that I have biased opinions that in the end do more harm than good.

I realized that even though there are people that do and say things that go against my faith and beliefs...that doesn't mean I have the right to be mean or nasty. I got wrapped up in my own biases and well...I forgot the importance of loving my neighbors as I would love myself. Neighbors being anyone from anywhere no matter what faith, identity or beliefs they hold...they're all still human beings and I need to look at all humans as God's creation, no less worthy of his love than I am.

I realized I was developing a sense of superiority which is so wrong...it leads to pride...and pride leads to the ultimate fall. I feel bad for the way I've been, but I'm glad I realized I was wrong and must admit the truth to myself and others. Last night as I prayed and considered my actions it came to me...my heart is in the right place but my mind and biases were clouding my judgment and making my heart harden towards others and I can't let that happen.

I want to apologize to anyone that I might have unknowingly hurt or even intentionally hurt. I think its important to remember that all living creatures have their value and human beings have freedom of individually for a reason. We were given free will to choose if we go to Jesus or not. It's not my place to try and fix anybody or tell them what to think, do or feel.

The most important thing is giving love, understanding and compassion to all people, animals and nature. I can't let political ideologies get in the way of what's right. It's important to always treat people with a base level of respect. Treat others how I'd like to be treated. It's not my business to judge or condemn others.

People are free to choose and I am free to choose. I have decided what matters is to love people while they are HERE on earth, right now! we have to love them, we have to overcome all these insecurities qnd judgemental thoughts standing in the way of loving each other. We have to do better, stop attacking each other. We have to stop pointing fingers and being angry all the time, it doesn't solve anything, it's counter productive. I'm so tired of being mad over some dumb crap I saw in the media online or on television. I'm not falling for all this extreme polarization of opinions anymore.

So to all people no matter your nationality, religious beliefs or identity beliefs...I'm going to do better, hold myself accountable for any poor choices I make or hurt I cause. I have mental health issues of my own, inherited in the genes yet that's no excuse to treat people badly in any capacity and you know what else...it's not MY place to condemn anyone lest I condemn myself unknowingly. So I vow to do better.

Sending love out to all who read this. Please know you are valued and loved by God even if you don't value God, that's your choice. In the end I'm only responsible and accountable for my own choices and actions. Thanks for reading I hope this message of love and admittance of how wrong I was makes someone out there that feels ostracized or hated by the world...feel loved instead.

I'm not superior or better than anyone, I'm a sinner and choose to rebuke these hateful thoughts I've had this past year. I can't let the seed of hate bloom and take hold. I need to grow seeds of love and positive growth. That's what matters, I do believe with all my heart that we "humanity" are family and should treat each other better and this planet too. Take care and God bless all people. 🙏

[luxu-loveskh]

random chaos lore bc i enjoy typing shit

chaos has a tust value of 240

which are his instagram(or whatever the tbhx equivalent of instagram) followers

he makes clips of himself while his teammates comit crimes

one of his teammates put alot of tech and programs on his phone so that he wont be tracked

they all live in one place

enlightener joins at some point but only alot later learns chaos is og nice bc chaos broke his helmet

chaos will at some point kidnap wreck and get him to join his villain group/vigilante group

chaos is for the most part camera distractor, he does poses infront of cams so noone can see the others

he has a ability that disrupts the power heroes gain from their trust

he can only use it tho when hes holding the arm of the hero at the very spot the trust value is

that power is what he got from his 240 fans and all those who fear chaos

any other powers he has are tech

[palatinewolfsblog]

The Age of Ambiguity (for my dear Friend @acommonloon ) "The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance." - Russell D. Moore

[angels-heap]

Sometimes….I dream about how all the original half life are loose to non-canon(cheese).

Every day I wake up thankful that Opposing Force is, at best, debatably canon and I don't have to give a single shit about Race X or Adr*an Sheph*rd if I don't want to.

[t4tstarvingdog]

just saw someone say they would let a specific guy mansplain to them and then said they didn’t know what he was talking about and like. that’s Not what mansplaining means… i think you just don’t value what men have to say in general

[berf-a-smurf]

Yeah I vape! I

Value

All

People

Equally

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brendan O'Neill

Published: Nov 11, 2023

One of the weirdest things about identitarian activists is that they hate being asked where they’re from but they love telling you where they’re from. Politely inquire about their ethnic or cultural origins and they’ll damn you as a racist. ‘How dare you, I’m as British as you!’, they’ll yell, either to your face or in a column in the Guardian in which they’ll document at great, yawn-inducing length the horror of having some dim pleb ask about their family origins.

Then, in the next breath, before you’ve even had a chance to splutter your apology, they’ll tell you their entire ancestral history. You’ll know where their great grandmother was born, the exact quantity of melanin grandad had in his skin, which maternal haplogroup they belong to, as revealed by 23andMe. Just don’t say ‘Oh, that’s where you’re from’, because they’ll call you racist again.

This political schizophrenia of taking offence at the question ‘Where are you from?’ while simultaneously feeling a burning urge to tell the entire world where you are from was best captured in the Ngozi Fulani controversy. You remember Ms Fulani: she’s the black charity worker from Hackney in London whose ‘racist’ run-in with long-serving royal aide Lady Susan Hussey hit the headlines last year. Lady Hussey’s crime? At a Buckingham Palace do, she asked Ms Fulani where she is from. Call the cops! What a bigoted old bat.

Not so fast. Ms Fulani was adorned in African threads at the palace. She frequently decks herself out in the Pan-African colours and Africa-shaped earrings. To constantly suggest to the world that you are from somewhere else and then reach for the smelling salts when someone asks ‘Where, exactly?’ is a bit much, no?

Now, in literary form, Afua Hirsch has done the same thing. Ms Hirsch is an author, broadcaster and writer for the Guardian. Her first book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, was all about the horror, the sheer indignity, of ‘The Question’. The question, of course, is ‘Where are you from?’. I am asked this ‘every single day, often multiple times’, said Hirsch. Really? Where’s she hanging out? It feels like a ‘daily ritual of unsettling’, she wrote. Oh, please. If I penned a sad book every time someone asked me, on account of my very un-British name, ‘What part of Ireland are you from?’, or ‘Where were your parents born?’, I’d be the most prolific author in Christendom.

Now, we have Ms Hirsch’s second book, Decolonising My Body. And you’ll never believe it: it is an eye-wateringly detailed answer to… The Question! Here’s my question: if Hirsch hates being asked where she is from, why has she written a whole tome on where she is ‘from’?

I now know more about Ms Hirsch’s ethnic and cultural origins than I do about my own. To her credit, she admits that this is because she comes from a staggeringly privileged background. I ‘know quite a lot about my ancestors’ and ‘there’s a privilege attached to this’, she says. Her African ancestors were not the ‘enslaved’, but rather were ‘antecedents about whom written records were kept’. Fancy. As someone who knows next to nothing about his colonised forebears – largely thanks to the Potato Famine of the 1840s and the catastrophic fire at the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922 – I confess to feeling envy while reading Ms Hirsch’s comprehensive tale of her origins. How the other half live, eh?

When I say her new book is detailed, I mean it is detailed. In her first book, she told us off for being nosey about her family origins; in her new book, she’s telling us about the time she got her butthole lasered. She finds herself in ‘the undignified position of spreading my butt cheeks under the chill of a laser clinician’s hosepipe-like nozzle, as atoms are excised, electrons rise and fall, and light beams are making their way into my crack’. The whole thing cost her £1,000. They must be paying well at the Guardian if contributors can splash out a grand on having their anal fluff zapped.

Surely we need to talk about how easily the identitarian elites can shift from exasperation at being asked ‘Where are you from?’ to absolute blaséness about telling the world what their ringpieces look like. Don’t you dare ask where my family is from but please listen to me describe the hair follicles on my arsehole. Excuse me, what?

As its title suggests, Hirsch’s book is a somewhat narcissistic endeavour. It’s all about her body. More specifically, it’s about how empire and colonialism interrupted the mystical traditions through which Hirsch’s African ancestors marked and celebrated their bodies – with tribal tattoos, menstrual festivals and whatnot – and how Hirsch now wants to rediscover all that stuff.

She says she wants to ‘decolonise’ her body of its ‘Western’ expectations – thinness, hairlessness, white-defined attractiveness – and let it become more African. Imagine how time-rich, and literally rich, you would need to be to spend so much energy obsessing over your own flesh and skin. To publish a book about decolonising the body of a privately educated Guardianista while everyone else is wondering if they have enough cash to keep the lights on speaks to the pathological self-regard of the new elites. In this era of economic, military and moral crises, Hirsch is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that the fact that her period ‘still often takes me by surprise’ is something we need to know.

Hirsch’s argument is that she has been violently ripped from the ‘magical’ traditions of her African history by colonialism and capitalism. So where her historical forebears held menstruation ceremonies and celebrated women for having hairy legs and insisted upon the tattooing of female flesh, our new era heaps shame on women for bleeding, discourages female hair growth, and idolises ‘pure’ over ‘marked’ flesh. None of this is quite right though, is it? Period chatter is everywhere these days. You can’t so much as click on Instagram without seeing some feted female influencer showing off hair-covered shins that would make Peter Sellers wonder if he should reach for some Veet. As for tats – not having a tattoo is the great shame in the 21st-century West. What, you haven’t had a tribal slogan pasted on your pasty flesh by a needle-wielder in Camden? What’s wrong with you?

And yet our body-decolonising Ms Hirsch perseveres, regardless. To counter the evil West’s disdain for old African tribes’ celebration of menstruation, she takes her poor daughter to a tribal period shindig in south London. They have to traverse the South Circular, ‘one of the most congested roads not just in London, but in the world’, and Hirsch, under instruction from the London-based tribal priestess, must wear all-white clothing, which in this case means a ‘floor-length summer robe, made from soft sheets of cotton’. Still, at least it connects Hirsch to her tribal lineage, even if her daughter, by Hirsch’s own admission, would rather be anywhere else.

Hirsch’s favourite word is ‘conditioning’. She thinks women like her – women of non-British origins – have been ‘conditioned’ to discard the tribal rituals their elders engaged in. Perhaps. Or perhaps black women and all women in London in 2023 would just rather buy some tampons for their pubescent daughters than subject them to an old-world menstrual ritual in a posh garden in south London. Who can tell?

Hirsch says ‘the forces of globalisation’ lead to a situation where ‘people like me’ – people of colour – have been ‘conditioned’ to behave and think in a particular way. That is, in a Western way. There’s a darkly ironic twist here. Hirsch’s obsession with the idea of ‘conditioning’ means she ends up viewing African-origin people in a similar way to how old colonialists viewed them – as vacant-brained entities swayed this way and that by the messaging of their superiors under capitalism. It smells like neo-colonialism disguised as anti-colonialism.

Hirsch thinks that even she – an expensively educated, successful writer – has been ‘conditioned’. She wonders if her submission to laser hair-removal is a craven acceptance of Western culture’s white-supremacist loathing of female hair. ‘Why do I keep on coming back’, she wonders, ‘to uncomfortable and expensive appointments, just to squash the capillaries which nature, in its wisdom, wanted us to have in our nether regions’? Again with the nether regions. She ends up staring at her vagina and reminiscing about her lost hair. She beholds the ‘pathetic little tuft of hair clinging to my bikini area, with a forlorn sense of having banished something that may have loved me’. I cannot imagine ever having a deep thought about my pubes – is that only me?

Who is responsible for the fact that even Hirsch, with all her education, has done things to her body that she later thinks she shouldn’t have done? It’s Charles Darwin. It’s always Charles Darwin. On the thousands of pounds she’s spent on ‘pink-packaged razors’ and ‘painful, expensive waxing’, Hirsch says, ‘The person I do blame… is Charles Darwin’. You might think of Darwin as the most important scientific figure of the period of Enlightenment, the brilliant man who revealed to us the truth of both nature and humanity, but to Ms Hirsch he’s the bloke whose ‘paradigm-shifting work on evolution’ led to the inexorable destruction of ‘attitudes to body hair [that] were as diverse as the cultures [they were] rooted in’.

In short, Darwin’s exploration of the origins of species, of the origins of man, helped to nurture a colonial discomfort with tribal culture. Imagine witnessing the epoch-shaping discoveries of a man like Darwin and thinking: ‘He’s the reason I feel compelled to get my butthole lasered.’ The narcissism of it, the anti-Enlightenment of it.

Anti-Enlightenment is the right phrase for where Hirsch ends up. Throughout the book she dabbles not only with tribal cultures – which, in my view, declined and fell for good reason – but also with astrology and even witchcraft. She quotes authors who bemoan the disdaining by ‘intelligent persons’ of ‘witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts and fairies’. It falls to her sensible-sounding parents to keep a check on her descent into pre-modern hysteria. Her father, the esteemed geophysicist Peter Hirsch, responds to her pleas that a planetary ‘conjunction’ in the sky must be a sign that she should change her life by saying: ‘It’s just from our arbitrary viewpoint that the planets appear close together… It doesn’t mean anything deeper.’ Yes, dad!

Her mum is even better. Asked by Afua why women of African origin don’t wear ‘waist beads’ anymore, her mum essentially says: ‘Because we have nice knickers now.’ Hirsch discovers, alongside the wonder of menstrual rituals and tribal tats, that wearing beads across one’s belly is a great African way to demonstrate a) that you are fertile and b) you have a chunky ass. Why don’t you wear them, she asks her Ghanaian-British mum? To which comes the glorious reply: ‘As soon as we heard about Marks & Spencer’s underwear, we stopped wearing beads…’ Exactly. All those desperately poor African ladies who hold up their sanitary / undergarment equipment with beads around their bellies would love a pair of comfy high-street knickers, even if wealthy writers like Afua Hirsch frown upon such basic desires. Give me good underwear over tribal realness any day of the week.

Fundamentally, this is a daft book. It bemoans Western capitalism while singing the praises of billionaires like Oprah Winfrey and Rihanna. (And the people, black and white, whose labour is exploited by Oprah’s media machine and Rihanna’s make-up machine? Shush! Don’t mention them.) It attacks cultural appropriation while telling the tale of this hyper-privileged Londoner who gets ‘adorned’ in the fashions of ancient Africans.

I hate to be the one to ask this, but how is it any different for a privately educated woman of colour from Wimbledon to experiment in the cultures and jewelleries of African nations than it is for a right-on white ‘appropriator’ to do the same? It would be like me donning the animal skins my ancestors wore as they searched high and low for grub in the wilds of pre-modern Ireland. ‘Wanker’ would be the cry of friends and family if I were to put on the rough uniform of my tragic, regressive forebears.

Hirsch’s retreat from modernity into the witchy traditions of old is some rich lady shit. Anyone who can traipse through London to attend menstrual rituals and traverse Africa to examine beads and pants is clearly someone with too much time on their hands. And that’s the rub. Identity politics is a fundamentally privileged pursuit. Indeed, it is the means through which the well-off launder their class privilege and turn it into oppression. There is nothing in Ms Hirsch’s plush, lovely life that can be described as oppression – apart from being asked The Question, of course… – and so she plunders ancient communities for little pieces of victimhood she might claim as her own. And thus is her cultural power in the here and now fortified, with more of that hottest currency of all: ethnic suffering.

Hirsch’s book confirms that the new elites have retreated from reason, fleeing from Enlightenment into the tattooed arms of fashionable tribalism. ‘Educated people, and people like me, [were] brought up to learn about, understand and respect science’, she writes, but now many of us are ‘following our curiosity’ and embracing ‘systems of ancestral knowledge’. Yes you are. From ‘decolonise the curriculum’ to the upper-middle-class fads for everything from African jewellery to Tibetan spiritualism, the right-on and rich are turning their backs on modernity and its gains and knowledge. Knock yourselves out. The rest of us, however, who have no cultural clout to gain from dabbling in magic and other ancient bullshit, prefer science, civilisation and comfortable undergarments.

==

These people are fucking bonkers. They think they're the most fascinating and enlightened people on the planet, when they're just the most mediocre, narcissistic people, using big, empty, academic, jargony words to hide the fact they're completely fucking insane.

For the record, Hirsch's ancestors are Norwegian, German-Jewish, British and Ghanaian. So her appropriation of African aesthetics isn't actually any more meaningful than espousing her Norwegian viking ancestry.

We have to stop giving these lunatics oxygen.

[ratsandfashion]

You know how I’ve posted before about how some people seem to have only gotten into social justice in order to just be more bigoted than ever but to make it seem progressive? Like wanting to get applauded for what’s just plain misogyny so they just put white/cis/straight/etc in front of their comments about women

Yeah that’s what’s happening right now with antisemitism. Like some people were clearly just WAITING EAGERLY for the FIRST CHANCE to be violently anti-Jewish monsters and feel like they’re the good guys.

[interiorlulus]

Everytime you think you are done finding the most infuriating people on the internet yet, the ig fyp works its magic.

[william-r-melich]

My Mind Is Opening Up - 04/25/2024

Something wonderful is happening to me. About a month ago I decided to quit using marijuana, but I thought quitting cold turkey would be too difficult, so I decided to limit my usage to once a week. After my first week from that decision, I noticed a significant improvement in my cognitive and writing abilities. My thoughts were coming to me with much more clarity. I'm finding it much easier to figure things out and creatively express my thoughts more effectively. These last few weeks have been very interesting. In that time, I have created 9 riddles and wrote one of my most entertaining and interesting article which I posted here last week entitled, "What You Really Need to Know About the Trump Trial in New York But Were Afraid to Ask." My thoughts and emotions just poured out from my mind, expressing my frustrations at the current situation involving Trump and his legal battles, as well as the declining state of our once great country. The riddles began with my first one I recalled from memory as a question I asked myself about 20 years ago, which I was never able to find an answer to until about two weeks ago. The question, which I decided to use as a riddle was this, "What is both the smallest and largest thing in existence?" Not only did I find an answer, I found 50 of them, which can be found on my website; RealitysReal.com, at the end of the Poetry & More section. The process of my reasoning was very interesting, as I found myself using the same line of thinking for other areas of consideration. As an example, in reference to the riddle I just mentioned, as I was going through a process of logical analysis, I discovered that the word, "everything" is slightly different than the word, "existence."

Existence only contains everything that actually does exist. Everything is closer to reality in the aspect of having both abstraction and the concrete. Although abstraction does exist, since it is an abstraction as a form of energy produced by the mind, its existence can't be completely independent as inherent since it's originated form something that can. For example, the idea that not anything is real would wipe away everything including itself because the idea as an idea and not what it represents is real, but not true.

I went on to describe some of the answers I had decided to use and others to eliminate, and I'll not disclose those in case you're interested in trying to solve the riddle yourself. In an earlier analysis leading up to the conclusion that everything and existence are different, I was considering two particular words, "theory" and "words," as answers to the riddle, which I had decided not to use. This is what I wrote.

Words? That's sort of like theory. Those could each erase themselves out, but they don't have to. That's like suggesting the possible representation of the smallest and largest. Does that qualify? No, not really. My other words can't just be anything in relation to how they would apply to the riddle, whereas "theory" can be immediately disqualified by the suggestions of alternatives or implied modifications. The word "words", however, being as universal as existence itself in what they can represent, that they can be applied correctly. And since that being accurate is or should be the goal of using "words", as is the goal of "theory", they merely work as a potential, but not exclusively as an actualized one as they can be mistaken. Whereas a universal word like "existence" can only be as it is. Therefore, "theory" and "words" do not work.

This was quite a process of reasoning in determining the answers to my riddles, and one riddle in particular kept me up all night. I find what's happening to me as my mind continues to expand to be very interesting. I must remain sober so that I can further advance in this enlightening journey I'm on. Where it leads me is yet to be discovered, I suspect I will create many more ideas and expressions of meaning and purpose. My mind is on fire and my desire is to keep rolling with it so I can bring to the world something of value that will positively inspire my readers to improve their quality of life. I really do believe that thinking adds value in many immeasurable ways...

[luminessdoodles]

bunch of sketches i dont think im gonna finish since i'm reaching the end of this sketchbook :0

mostly twst which for me means mostly rook, guest starring felix fire emblem

(↑ this isnt porn he just drank poison and is happy about it)

[turiyatitta]

The Spirituality Façade

Navigating Between Pretense and AuthenticityIntroduction:In an age where spirituality is often a trend, the differentiation between authentic spiritual pursuit and a mere display of piety becomes pivotal. If one merely adopts the garb of spirituality without authenticity, is it spirituality at all? This article seeks to explore the delicate balance between presenting oneself as spiritual and…

[mr-deep-downer]

"tsk tsk my parents have an age gap of 30 years" bro that is anything but a flex.

[lady-inkyrius]

Had to do a basic JS refresher for a module and god weak/dynamic languages are the worst.

I really hope people aren't writing code that relies on the actual value returned and not just its truthiness, that seems like hell to debug.

[orcelito]

With gay moon post approaching 600 notes (600 notes... 😥) I have had a few realizations

1: not everyone shares the same observations that I do. Which I say just bc I was IMMEDIATELY struck by the framing of Vash with the moon in that one panel the first time I saw it, but I've had a number of ppl mention they hadn't noticed it

Which leads into 2: the reason that post has so many notes is bc pointing out moments like that holds value to people. Plus I guess my commentary & conclusions? Plus acting as something for people to bounce their own ideas off of.

And then 3: there are probably more moments I could explore in such a way, & that could hold value to people