Today
sarcastically called today Capture the Flag Day, to which I responded it was the Epiphany, the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas, in unironic world.This reminds me of Naomi Wolf’s article about Christmas having previously been an obviously religious holiday. Yet despite the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song, I didn’t even know when the twelve days of Christmas were until a couple of years ago, when I learned that they were the twelve days between Christmas and the Epiphany. I now make sure to keep my Christmas decorations out until that time is over, and I don’t feel let down after December 25th anymore because there are still 11 more whole days of Christmas and Rudolph should’ve never made a New Year’s episode when there’s still more Christmas, but then, that ties back into her article about the secularization of Christmas.
Did you know all gifts for all 12 of the days of Christmas are birds? It’s clearly Tzeentch’s fault.
I’ve been reading a lot recently about how higher education is supposedly just going to fall. This makes me somewhat more relaxed since I read more academic papers than most of the professors yet I don’t get paid for it because of all the corruption. I’m not quite completely locked out, but am I really supposed to spend two decades on a doctorate if I already know most of this stuff and what I don’t, I can learn much faster? Meanwhile essentially no research is being done, we are going back to the Dark Ages, we aren’t even on the Moon anymore, and lots of individuals like me know more than most of “the establishment” about whatever we decided to study.
I think I differ a bit from the authors of most of these articles, because I don’t think college just needs to be abolished, but probably a bit decentralized and the Internet, ironically the product of academia back when it was less corrupt, can be a good counterweight. Why do colleges cost so much when you can cheaply take classes at the art school down the street or whatever? Even standardized testing shouldn’t cost that much, ACT, SAT, and CLEP tests are nowhere near as expensive as courses. It’s basically become a racket to make the incompetent look good, but the fact there still are art schools down the street and there are standardized tests makes me think it can still exist, it just needs sweeping reformations and people need to be allowed to be tested more easily for anything they learn on their own, however, the idea someone would want to take a course in-person about college-level subject matter with other people and a professor doesn’t itself seem like the problem.
If a civil war breaks out, we will win and they will lose because the government decided to become laughably incompetent due to trying to look woke. I hope that can be averted or at least be short, I don’t want to continue the trajectory of rocketing back to the Dark Ages.
Which brings me to the biggest point.
Are these people who judge other people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character and don’t even watch Star Trek really woke? Or are they just, you know, dishonest politicians? Forget about “right” vs. “left,” I don’t think those categories even apply to American politics to be honest since our country was founded before the French Revolution happened and has always been based on liberal values in the sense of classical liberalism. We don’t necessarily want to keep everything the same as when the country was founded, but I think it’s almost a mind-cancer to compare American politics to French Revolution politics. Do you want the Sun King or the guillotine? My answer is a resounding “no” because we don’t want that here. Even Ayn and is art deco and industrialism, not a pining to go back to the Dark Ages because even if everyone was stupid, stinky, lazy, poor, and ate gross food, you’d look better if you happened to be born into certain families and scared the serfs with useless superstitions. It’s not better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven and everyone should know that by the fact Hell is literally Hell.
So, to my main point: we need to avoid mind-cancer by imagining which world we want to live in and stiving for that. I declare today Capture the Narrative Day, which sounds a lot like what “Epiphany” means anyway. What would Jesus do? Not spout garbage everywhere of course.
said recently that he thought one of the great things about stories is they make complex ideas comprehensible to the masses compared to all the sorts of technical analyses that exist.In my article on liberalism I said we basically collectively have basically mind cancer due to lack of intelligence and I was making a very scientific metaphor there. Life is negative entropy and negentropy requires energy and intelligence. We have the energy, but it’s not being guided by anything like DNA so ideas are sort of just proliferating like cancer, “fake news” and all that. I think the intelligence we need in this case is stories since we obviously don’t structure society with DNA, DNA makes proteins and society isn’t a protein, well obviously that’s a metaphor.
I think the real issue with “woke” is our entire society has been super woke for a long time. Contrary to Jordan Peterson’s assertion that we tell conservative stories, we tell über-woke stories like Star Trek and that’s great. Harry Potter might have some elements I would say are conservative like the hero’s journey, but upon closer inspection, Harry Potter is not a thoroughly conservative story.
All good stories are probably partially about conserving some things and making progress in others so that’s back to left vs. right being more or less inapplicable to American politics even if Harry Potter is a British story, but Harry Potter is about a secret school for people who are different because they have magic powers and society won’t accept them and is afraid and they are all indoctrinated by a bunch of professors. Dumbledore would be a little more obviously coded as gay if there weren’t the whole trope about wizards not marrying even if most of the other wizards and witches did it, but the reason Dumbledore is a 90-year-old bachelor is kind of beside the point in a children’s story anyway. In some ways Harry Potter might as well be X-Men as much as it’s based on Earthsea as well, which, hello? An Ursula K. Le Guin book? Not exactly something European throne-and-altar conservatives tend to love even if it’s not a preachy as Margaret Atwood’s famous book tends to be.
We basically breathe woke at this point like fish breathe water. Even Donald Trump made a woke cap to try to recruit Black voters during his presidency.
I think the issue is probably that our politicians aren’t really woke, they’re politicians. They are some of the few people who aren’t woke because of their privilege. They don’t like Star Trek and X-Men and Harry Potter and the Matrix, they like politician stuff about history and the past, which is one reason I think we need to force politicians to study STEM so they become “nerds” like regular people, in addition to having to prove they have some kind of work ethic. And now we have a lot of politicians uselessly taking up space in universities and trying to keep real scholars out so they can be like “Look at me, I am a diverse university professor, I’m just like Dumbledore and Charles Xavier, aren’t I woke?” because we live in a great woke society but these people aren’t, they are just stupid awful politicians who are dishonest and especially dishonest with themselves. And because they targeted the one institution our society runs on first, now we are being catapulted back to the Dark Ages while India is managing to be on the Moon. Like why are we Americans patriotic? Freedom and the Moon landing. And now we don’t have either of those two things anymore so we can be patriotic because of hope. And I’m not giving up hope because I’m not a traitor.
We need to hold our politicians accountable for becoming Dolores Umbridge (hey, you’re a professor, just not the one you wanted to be!) and make our own alternative systems so they don’t have a monopoly. Then we can return to the Star Trek future instead of the awful Dark Ages which America didn’t even exist as a country during. Happy Epiphany and seize the day, seize the narrative every day! Because narratives drive us all.
This song must be racist because the rabbit is White. I shall continue to capitalize White and Black even if all the other ethnicities are just capitalized due to being derived from proper nouns because it ticks off everyone at once. Black White Black White Black White.
I think the UK and US both need to start dropping some of these waste of time courses that saddle people with so much debt but are useless outside in the real world.
Because let’s be real. If someone applied for a job at a company you owned and told you they’d been to university then you’d be like great!! Then they tell you they studied Taylor Swift and that would be interview over 😂.
The first casualty of the Gaza Genocide was truth. The second was woke. Woke politics looks petty and trivial when compared to what is happening in both Ukraine and Gaza, and the Red Sea, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Lebanon for that matter.
Throw in the fact that the economy continues to suck for the majority of Americans, and the fact of the matter is that we simply have neither the time nor the energy to focus on such trivialities as woke. It's dead, and good riddance.