society – Page 157

For Those Ignored By The Political Class, The Only Real Protest Is Not Voting

Several opinion pieces have appeared in the mainstream media in recent days exhorting Kiwis to vote in next month’s election. With choice phrases like “not voting won’t solve anything”, “the 2014 result was determined by the people who turned up” and “Voting builds our political power”, all mainstream propaganda organs are doing their best to get you to consent to the status quo.

Because that is all that voting is – you giving your consent for things to carry on pretty much exactly as they already are. The political class will interpret the fact that you voted as a sign that you are content with the overall system – and therefore as a sign that nothing need be changed.

And so, your vote has a zero percent chance of changing anything. You might as well dance naked in a thunderstorm praying for the lightning gods to strike down the enemies of the nation.

How the country will be run for the next three years has already been decided by the mutual agreement of the sort of person who politicians really do listen to – rich old people, who have got together long ago with those politicians and hashed out the precise details of how things are going to be, whether the masses like it or not.

If you’re not a wealthy Baby Boomer, the politicians couldn’t give a fuck what you think. But they do want your consent for what they’re going to do to you.

If they don’t have that then they run the risk of provoking the rise of some kind of revolutionary movement that might actually make a difference to how society is run. Such as: a movement that campaigned on an expensive universal basic income, or on an equally expensive capital gains tax, or on an immigration policy that reflected the will of all Kiwis instead of just multiple property owners and those looking for cheap labour.

And this is the reason why there is all the propaganda right now to get people to vote. Voting in a democratic system is the same as you giving your consent to how the country is governed – and to the people who own both sides of the political system, the consent of the population they’re exploiting is the only thing left that they don’t already have.

If you do vote, then politicians of both the left and right wings of the ruling party tend to naturally assume that you’re more or less happy with the direction of things.

Knowing in advance that the winner of the election is going to ignore your will in favour of those who have money, your only means of protest is to not vote at all. Past a certain level of disenfranchisement, the only action one can take to affect the system is to not vote. A refusal to vote is the only way your voice can really be heard.

If the turnout rate in next month’s General Election was less than 50%, the measured degree of public discontent would be too great to just shrug off, it would then become possible for some hard questions to be asked about the direction the country was going. The mainstream media would be forced to ask whether or not the political system was really a democracy or just an oligarchy masquerading as one.

The higher it is, the more likely it becomes that political discourse is replaced with photos of spaghetti on pizzas, videos of dropping in to London for a sister’s wedding, and witch-hunts against outsider candidates.

You can help force New Zealand politicians to take the will of New Zealanders seriously by withholding your vote this September 23rd.

Social Justice Warrior Culture Is The Totalitarianism of Our Age

Every age has its evil. The last century gave us Nazism and Communism, the century before that gave us colonial genocides, the centuries before that gave us horrific religious persecutions and mass murders. This essay looks at the totalitarianism of the early 21st century: SJW culture.

Totalitarianism is defined by a striving to regulate every aspect of both public and private life wherever possible. It’s the antithesis of freedom. Benito Mussolini, one of history’s most infamous totalitarians, declared that even the spiritual life of the citizenry is to be controlled to the finest detail.

According to Hannah Arendt, the appeal of totalitarianism lies in its ideology, which, like religions, provide “a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the past, present, and future.”

Theocracies achieve this with an ideology about the nature of God and the inevitable triumph of the followers of that God. Nazism achieved this with an ideology about race struggle and the inevitable triumph of the Aryan race, and Communism achieved this with an ideology about class struggle and the inevitable triumph of the proletariat.

The essential point that distinguishes these ideologies from free thought is that an ideology offers an easy, pre-packaged answer to any question that might arise. Because of this it is never necessary to actually think about anything, much less discuss anything with another person – all answers derive directly from reference to the ideology.

Much like a religious scripture does for a religious fanatic, an ideology forms the basis of reality for political fanatics. If a person has a powerful desire to remake the world in their image for political reasons, there will be an ideology at the bottom of it.

Social Justice Warrior culture is a form of Communism, in that it is explicitly horizontalist. Like all other horizontalist ideologies, anyone who distinguishes themselves, for any reason, is assumed to have done so by immoral means. The logic behind this lies in the ideological assumption that all are equal.

Because the belief in the equality of all people is fundamental to SJW culture, a natural corollary is that anyone who has achieved an outcome that elevates them above the masses must have necessarily done so by immoral means.

And so, the higher standard of living in the West, when compared to the Middle East and Africa, cannot be explained outside of the template of colonial oppression. All Western wealth is considered stolen; a crime that needs to be redressed by horizontalist action.

There is no room in Social Justice Warrior culture for anyone to put effort into bettering themselves – everything that betters a person is considered to be the result of unfair privilege. As this column has previously pointed out, this ideology is what Nietzsche would have called a slave morality, in that it is fundamentally based in resentment and a desire to rip everyone down to the lowest level.

Where this ideology really goes wrong – and where it is in danger of becoming a totalitarianism akin to Nazism and Communism – is its utter failure to accept that certain mentalities and cultures create poverty among their victims of their own accord.

And so, the sorry state of the Middle East cannot be explained by the legendary unwillingness of Middle Easterners to live in peace, and neither can it be explained by the extremely high rates of religious fundamentalism, nor the appalling human rights record of their rulers, nor the cultural indifference to education and free thought, nor the widespread practice of infant genital mutilation.

It’s all the fault of colonialism, or America bombing them.

Likewise, the near-infinite hatred that some disadvantaged groups have for other disadvantaged groups is all blamed on influence from the West. The utter contempt that Muslims have for homosexuals cannot be blamed on Muslims themselves, because to do so would be to imply that a disadvantaged group can be less moral than an advantaged one – and this is in direct opposition to SJW ideology.

All of this would be just another half-arsed theory were it not for the demonstrated ability and willingness of this ideology to destroy the lives of anyone who opposes it. The most striking recent example was the sacking of a Google employee for questioning the social engineering practices of his company. James Demore wrote a manifesto that made the assumption that biology trumps SJW ideology, and this was decreed to be wrongthink punishable by the destruction of his career.

Believing that biology is real is a thoughtcrime when it is considered to advance “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace” – in other words, biology is what we tell you it is, and any disagreement is grounds for retaliation.

The firing of one engineer is not comparable to the historical crimes of 20th century totalitarian states, true, but this example shows how far SJWs will go to deny reality where it conflicts with their ideology, and this bodes poorly for a peaceful 21st century.

The simmering powderkeg is the tens of millions of Muslims who now live in the West, and who can never integrate. The mass resettlement of Muslims into the West was never carried out with the consent of Westerners, and it was never carried out with reference to any study that demonstrated improved social or economic outcomes for Westerners.

This social engineering was, and continues to be, forced on Westerners by people who have adopted SJW ideology. If it leads to a civil war in Europe, then this ideology will be justifiably ranked alongside Nazism and Communism as one of humanity’s greatest mistakes.

People Like To Watch What Others Are Naturally Good At

Vladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua are both close to 2m tall and 110kg heavy – and it follows naturally that more people want to watch them fight than have sex

Why does the world’s most popular female porn star get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular male one? And why does the world’s most popular male athlete get paid orders of magnitude more than the world’s most popular female one? The current fashion is to attribute all manner of prejudice behind these two facts, but the reality is that it’s just a reflection of nature.

A bird looks awesome swooping through the air, but there’s nothing graceful about a waddling duck. A shark looks awesome sliding through the water, but on the floor of a boat a fish looks ridiculous. A cat looks awesome stalking some prey, but looks much less so when licking its own arse, as cats do.

There is a reason behind all of this. We humans appear to derive some aesthetic pleasure from observing parts of nature doing what they have developed to be the best at.

A bird is a creature of the air; naturally it looks best when in the air and not on the ground. A fish is a creature of the water; naturally it looks best when in the water and not on the ground.

Every creature looks the best in the environment that they have adapted the most to thrive in. This follows naturally from an appreciation of basic principles of biology.

And this is why the world’s highest paid porn star is, and always will be, a woman, and why the world’s highest paid sportsperson is, and always will be, a man: women are made to make love and men are made to make violence.

Both of those truths are highly unfashionable at the moment, because the zeitgeist is that all are equal in every single way. The trend at the moment is to insist on equality to the point of rejecting all evidence to the contrary (which even goes as far as some suggesting that the skill levels are equal in international men’s and women’s soccer, for example).

They are true nonetheless. Females were more than capable of reproducing asexually – the point of sexual reproduction is develop a subgroup within each species that is specially adapted to violence so that they can better protect those not adapted to it.

But because women are made to make love, the demand for watching them make love is (and always will be) much greater than it is for men. A woman is in her natural element when making love, and so looks better making love than fighting, and therefore people are much more willing to pay money for a chance to watch one do so.

And because men are made to make violence, the demand for watching them fight (and play sport, which is just ritualised violence) is and always will be much greater than it is for women. A man is in his natural element when fighting, etc.

Women’s sport can only catch on to the extent that it is a contest of skill, because that is essentially a contest of brainpower and men and women are not different there. So a sport such as cricket has a much greater chance of becoming a mainstream phenomenon than one such as soccer or rugby, much less boxing or MMA.

Even so it will never be as popular as the men’s version, because the demand (among both men and women) to watch men compete at sport will always be much greater. This will be true as long as men are better at fighting than women.

How Cyberpunk Did The World Become?

It’s now 33 years since Neuromancer was published – establishing the cyberpunk timeframe as near-future – and that’s as long as either Alexander the Great or Jesus had in this world. It’s long enough for this essay to look back from the vantage point of 2017 and see how cyberpunk Planet Earth ended up becoming in this timeline.

Where Neuromancer and Snow Crash were half right was in their prediction of a matrix within cyberspace that filled the human need for societal interaction. FaceBook and the other giants of social media certainly led the ordinary citizens of meatspace to spend a lot more time in cyberspace, but we are still limited to the bulletin board model.

Advancements in virtual reality technology have been limited, to a large part, by the need for extreme amounts of processing power. A VR setup must be capable of generating a sufficient rate of frames per second to avoid latency from the perspective of the user, because this leads to simulator sickness, which decreases the level of telepresence.

So nothing really like the eponymous all-encompassing virtual environment in The Matrix, or the metaverse, has yet arisen.

Where all of the cyberpunk classics got it right was in the widespread adoption of novel classes of synthetic drugs.

Humans have always loved to experiment with consciousness – use of magic mushrooms, cannabis and alcohol all predate the use of writing. So it was fairly predictable that new advances in chemistry would lead to new frontiers in the exploration of mental space.

Although most of the chemical enhancement in cyberpunk literature has been for the purposes of increasing martial aptitude, as in Lucifer’s Dragon, most of its use in consensual reality has been psychonautic. In other words, here on Earth people mostly use the new waves of drugs to get high – but that doesn’t make for very good fiction.

Blade Runner didn’t foresee much different in the way of human drug consumption, but it did anticipate how close artificial intelligence came to passing the Turing Test. Many people chat with bots on social media without even knowing it – especially in online poker rooms and on large politics pages.

Certainly this film, based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, accurately captured the uneasiness of being a human and dealing with something that appears entirely human but for subtle differences.

Where the classics tended to get it wrong was politically, especially the diminished role of territorial governments. There seemed to be a glib assumption, perhaps expressed in extremis in Snow Crash, that corporations and the influence of corporations would expand to the point where 20th century-style governments no longer held any power.

In reality, hard iron laws like “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” continue to hold true, and any government capable of raising sufficient taxation to raise an army or secret police will still be a force on the world stage.

In the world of soft power, Transmetropolitan correctly predicted that the political landscape would be as shallow and insane as ever. The absurdity of the various political candidates in Spider Jerusalem’s life are an eerily accurate foretelling of the rise of the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton circus.

Corporations have started implanting microchips in their employees, which has been a staple of cyberpunk horror for a long time. My own The Verity Key, however, predicted a different path of adoption for microchips under the skin: I figured that people, especially the technophilic, would adopt it themselves for increased access to private space.

It remains to be seen if this will happen – the expense involved in reaching a sustainable critical mass might make private adoption of RFID networks unworkable.

Things didn’t really get as dark and dystopic as cyberpunk predicted. This was always the probable outcome for a literary genre that consciously adopted elements of horror from other genres and from film noir. Things really just became weird. Perhaps the most accurate of all – predicting the current obsession with transgenderism – was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.

If there are new avenues of cyberpunk still to be explored, it’s possible that they will feature characters who are unrepentant rebels with regard to questions of cognitive freedom, in particular characters pushed underground by new technologies that make intrusion into the mind possible.

That’s one way in which the brilliant anime series Psycho-Pass blazes a new path: from the harder, engineering and physics based sciences towards the biological ones. Much like The Verity Key, the Psycho-Pass series raises the question of what life will look like when neuropsychological technology advances to the point where the private thoughts of every individual have become a public matter.

The controllers of the mindreading technology in Psycho-Pass are public entities (or at least government ones), which makes for an oppressive totalitarian atmosphere, as opposed to the nihilistic anarchy of The Verity Key. Probably this timeline became more nihilistic than totalitarian, but who knows what might still happen?

With news that remote-controlled drones and tank-like war machines running off AI might soon become cheap enough for terrorists or rogue states to use every day against enemy targets, the most cyberpunk elements of human history, fictional or otherwise, may be still to come.

Vince McLeod is the author of cyberpunk novel The Verity Key and of the upcoming cyberpunk novel The Man With A Thousand Fathers, to be serialised here starting from the summer of 2018.