Sunday Thought Kernels #3

Happy Father's Day

Paired Music:

(you may have to login to Spotify to play)

1. My half-brother J.P. De Veer is what you might call a “musician” and is interested in producing some ethereal beats for upcoming newsletters. James is a talented young man and so I am looking forward to what he creates. The songs will be the type you can read to/with, and I will try to listen to them as I write as I do believe there is a triad of energy transfer between writing/music/reading.
   

2. In the 2010s I was eternally kicking myself for not learning coding, Adobe design, and moving editing. Now that those areas are well saturated, I’m considering now what sort of skill base I’d want to get into in order to well-position myself for the next 10 years. Does it matter if I figure it out? I’ll probably do 20 minutes of an online tutorial and quit anyway.
   

3. I’m working on a pretty big project that will likely sap a way a lot of my time but I am still dedicated to my subscribers and this blog. I am committing myself to at least one weekly post and one Sunday wrap-up (this thing).
   

4. I’m still working on my read-through of A Revolution of the Mind by MV Perry. I’m going to be posting my review of the book on this blog sometime in the next month. I have done criticisms of essays, albums, and short stories before, but never a whole book. I find myself constantly considering the question of “where to begin?,” which takes me out of the reading a bit. So then I try to just be present with the text but this turns off my critical mind. So as usual, the right path is somewhere hovering between two poles - the one thing I am the worst at.
   

5. Somewhat ended a somewhat romantic relationship this week that not many of my friends were aware of. There was no big calamitous ending, there were no fireworks, no Tennessee Williams dialogue. It was just a handshake and a wave and then a turn in the opposite direction and a walk into two different sunsets. I find as I get older that ending relationships is much less fiery, much less protracted, much more civil, and somehow much sadder. Not sad in the way that you want to rip yourself apart and burst into flames, but more like that numbing sadness where you feel the cold transactional nature of existence and feel little parts of yourself dissolve, pixel by pixel.|
   

6. I no longer think the dialogue on transgenderism is one that I will engage in. I am privileged in this regard that I do not have children who would be affected by this new wave of thinking on the issue (which will surely bleed itself into policy soon enough). I think that one side of the debate is cartoonish and the other side is tedious. There’s only so many tweets I can read that say “can you BELIEVE what they’re doing now?” Yes, I absolutely can believe it. It’s completely unhinged from popular sentiment and driven by a vocal, threatening, and HIGHLY EFFECTIVE minority of individuals. They are winning, and they are winning BIG TIME. If you think that “the tide is turning” or that “the pendulum is swinging in the other direction,” you are being cucked by reality. There is no limit to the hyperbole that will be employed to shift the Overton window, no tactic too underhanded, no performance too absurd. Be prepared for it to get worse before it gets…even worse.
   
   If you have been consoling yourself with the thought of you and the fellas standing around drinking Manhattans ten years from now and wistfully reflecting on the “wild 20s,” you are in for a rude awakening. This is not the 1960s. The “crazy-talk” that your grandpappy spewing from the hippie commune was fleeting and ephemeral, shared mostly among its members. The madness flowing forth now has massive distribution networks and will remain emblazoned on the www. FOREVER. Perhaps the current mania will subside, but only to make way for an unthinkably worse cultural mania. I’ll be spending my time working on that piece. As for the Matt Walsh, “what is a woman” trans battalion, count me out. I’m done. It’s not gonna work.
   
   The truth is that there is a not a single think-piece in either the pro- or contra- camps that is bringing any new information to the table, just examples of the extremity and vulgarity of the other team. This is a power game, it always has been. It is part of a larger project that I do not believe has anything to do with gender but rather a test of how willing a populace is to submit to a 2+2=5 equation. The answer is: very few people are happy about it but the majority of people are willing to do it. And I am too. Is this surprising? Do you think I’m going to lose my job, my source of income, my livelihood because I chose to take a stand against an ideological orientation on gender? Absolutely not. I have no savings to fall back on, I will be destitute and sleeping on a family member’s couch. I’ll save my breath and my job, thanks.

   

   The Forgotten Workers by Ryan Mutter

   
   
   Is it disappointing to hear that? Certainly to anyone who assumed I was a counter-cultural freedom fighter battling to do what’s right. But there is no battle here in my words. There is no one visiting my site with an open mind toward this topic. My words can be better directed elsewhere, anticipating instead the next phase of the greater movement that we will soon be subject to. The transgender debate has no nuance, no “open forum,” no even-handed compromise in the end. The fact that any bit of nuance spoken about it into the either is immediately skewered as a form of hate speech tells me everything I need to know. This thing has far more power than me, more than I could ever mount a counter-defense to. The fact that I actually have no ill-will toward transgendered people, want them to have every right and freedom that I have, and wish no physical harm against is immaterial. That fact that my position - which is simply that we should not allow non-adults to make the very adult decision to alter their hormones and body structures during a crucial stage of their biological growth - is considered extremist and hateful tells me everything I need to know here. There is no debate, there is no free speech, there is no hope for western liberal ideology. That’s all dead and gone. I’m out. Onto something different. Not today satan.

7. In a broader way, I am onto something different. I can feel a tectonic shift in my ideology. Or perhaps less so my ideology and more so my methods/plan of action. I still advocate a great exodus from culture and the creation of a parallel and separate culture. This is the only way to truly represent the actual numbers of each side, which I believe will be staggeringly uneven. The problem is that there is such a culture of fear and reprisal, that a public vote would yield numbers almost exactly the opposite. The only way to represent the true shape of each bloc is to create cultural touchstones that attract people on purely a pleasure level. 50 people will sign a petition to have more bread-dead fun action movies while 50 million will go see them. We need to start creating parallel culture so that all of us who think shit is strange right now can vote with our feet and our ticket stubs and our subscriptions. Why are the only people doing this Breitbart or MAGA people making children’s cartoons about voter fraud? We need more production for normies that wish not for a reversal of cultural power but a nullification of it. Those who stand for a more chill and mindless existence must rise up - there is money to be made! Start new production companies, publishing houses, newspapers, blogs, whatever you can! Stop whining that you never got your invitation in the mail are starting writing your own invitations! But stupid is as stupid does, and stupid continually stands begging at the door of ye olde media institutions begging to be let back inside. My position remains: new Hollywood, new Random House, new Disney World.
   

8. Trees are the other piece of my lingering ideology needs to be cleaved. There is a part of me that relaxes into a “return to Gaia” position that I don’t actually believe in. Any part of me that is “pro wood-chopping” and “pro-real people talking in cafes” is slowly slipping away, proving itself to be nothing more than nostalgia or bullshit. As much as that’s what I enjoyed in my teens and 20s, we have to face reality. Your favorite coffeeshop isn’t going to allow smoking cigs indoors ever again. You don’t actually want to “smell the salt on the wind in the morning” next to the Pacific Ocean. Here’s what you actually want to do:
   
   1. Poast Cringe
   2. Play Counter-Strike
   3. Eat hot chip
   4. Die.

   
   Meat-space is over bro. Stop trying to make meat-space happen bro. If we keep trying to drag people back to Harvard Square for a good old-fashioned debate, we’re going to be waiting forever. They’re not coming. They are “elsewhere,” creating thriving communities online that perhaps don’t look like meat-space communities, but nonetheless hold the same affinities and potentials. I’m sorry Mother Earth but I give up on you too. The future is now online. The part of me that wishes to commune with nature, draw warmth from the magma core, howl at the moon with my pack is reactionary and antiquated. My time is better spent inhabiting these spaces and trying to create the things there that we could not sustain out here. Are we all going to wait until it’s too late?
   
   Why can’t we all just admit that if the culture war was over and the side of “real people living real lives” won out over the “terminally-online hacker pervs,” the first thing we would do is post about it online. Choosing to take up territory in an online community is not choosing to cleave your soul from your body and enter into the transhumanist bliss of cyberspace. Saying that it would is admitting that you are a person easily taken in by Charlatans. Think of it, if you need to, as a rescue mission. Setting up a base of operations on meta so that when the time comes and the place burns down, we’ll be ready to fireman carry people to the safety of the real. But in the meantime - the real needs some work done on it because this place is in bad shape.

Note: Sunday Thought Kernels are my Sunday wrap-up of random thoughts I’ve had throughout the week and do not represent my fixed opinions on anything. Some of them will be formed into essays, some of them will be infused in different ways into later writings, and some of them will never see the light of day ever again. These posts are intended to share my thought processes so that they may stoke my imagination and the imagination of others.