Depends on what the goal is. If it's to convince the woke using facts and logic, you're right - it's impossible, therefore pointless. If it's to use the woke as foils in order to demonstrate their intellectual vacuity and moral repugnance for onlookers, it can be highly effective. The point being to establish the opponents of woke as the actual intellectual elite, thereby in the long run rendering their control of academia irrelevant.
Does the emperor have any clothes? Initially I felt that people would ridicule the absurd but the reality is that people seem to fear the absurd and they willingly follow.
You should reread the original story The Emperor's New Clothes. When the emperor is revealed naked by the observant child, the crowd pauses, then keeps marching as if nothing happened.
Yes--it reminds me of Neo-Nazis claiming they’re not racist. They have two versions of their credo--one for the indoctrinated, who know what’s up, and another for the shit-munching masses. Another good analogy is Bill Clinton’s “I smoked but didn’t inhale” comment. The morons believed him, and those hip to the culture knew he was joking.
I've asked where are the fearless trial lawyers when we need them? You could also ask where are the fearless stand-up comedians? Who replaced George Carlin? Nobody.
The societal role of the comedian is to point out and to ridicule life's absurdities. Like you said, no one has replaced George Carlin, Richard Pryor ... Lenny Bruce. Too many have become simple court jesters.
Or the "socially-conscious" entertainers, the people who stand up to The Man. 99 percent of them became defenders of The Man. Those who didn't (like Vann Morrison) got to see which way the wind is really blowing these days.
We’ve mostly worn out and gone into hiding ... We’ve endured four decades of this war ... it’s the same war : fungible generations of whippersnappers but the same disambiguated cant.
Eugyppius’s caution here is much appreciated. Nonetheless, we know what’s going to happen. .
What would happen if 50 to 75 percent of the world's colleges were closed? If college became a place where only serious students attended? I can only think of a handful of vital professions where you really need a college degree.
But we can't close them or reduce the student count because practically the whole damn economy now depends on the "higher education complex." I live in a college town. What would happen to my town if Troy University closed shop? Trust me. Half the students at my alma mater don't need to be at college. As Eugyppius makes clear, the "teaching" or "scholarship" of most of the professors is irrelevant or counter-productive.
By now the Higher Education Complex, Military Industrial Complex and Science/Medical Complex are all too vast to shut down. We can throw in the "Government Complex." If you count federal, state and local governments, these departments must account for 35 percent of the jobs in America - 45 percent if you count vendors who depend on government contracts.
I think we will see more students and their parents decide that they can save the $100,000 tuition, room and board .... just as a common-sense "inflation work-around." I hope that in our Covid times more people have learned that the "best and brightest" in academia ... are obtuse. Surely some parents must be deciding, "We don't need those people to educate our child."
One way or another, the influence of these administrators and woke faculty members will be much smaller in the future.
I do think even if woke people and people brainwashed by this ideology aren't strong on independent skeptical thinking, every time I talk to (real) people (in the real world) and I just push for looking on some facts together, the discussion stops very fast, and their look like am just crazy and don't know what I am talking about vanishes from their face. They suddenly know, maybe it is them who haven't thought this through properly. They never talk about this in my presence again. This is a win! There is doubt now.
So I always argue to really convince the other side. Even if they don't show it, good arguments very often work, even if it takes time. It is like penetrating oil. Also it makes me a better debater. If I were to try to only show the onlookers that I am right, then I run the risk of trying to just embarrass the other side instead of just making honest good arguments. Doing that is not convincing onlookers very well.
As someone whose always been a “nice” person, I’m absolutely convinced that the way to battle wokeness (if such a thing can be done) is through ridicule. The Libsoftiktok and like accounts on Twitter, YouTube, and other media platforms are absolutely doing God’s work. You can’t fight it intellectually, you must expose the utter embarrassment and stupidity of it all.
No, that should not be burned into our brains at all. The opposite is true. It is important to speak out again and again and point fingers at inconsequential nonsense, lies, wrongness and inconsistencies. The forming of masses has to be interrupted as often as possible. Read Mathias Desmet.
Why confront Wokeness "intellectually"? It's far more effective to laugh at the Wokesters, boycott their endeavours and by pass them wherever possible.
One of the main aims of intellectual confrontation of wokeness must be to provide the ablest Christian children and young people, from whom the future leadership of the Church will be drawn, with arguments sufficient to persuade themselves not to join in with the Wokerie.
A primary tentpole of this takeover is to dumb us down to the lowest common denominator. Experienced and educated critical thinkers make for poor slaves. Old ways of thinking have to be eradicated. Division, demoralization, and the destruction of education are three key tools in achieving total domination.
Bread (UBI/SNAP), circuses (media), overbearing propaganda (news), fabricating and dramatically magnifying our differences (5th generation warfare), and radicalizing the populace (politics) are all being brought to bear against us:
By weaponizing woke ideology, a powerful group is destroying the modern world by poisoning the wells we all share of comradery, fellowship, and family – they are doing everything they can to decimate the ties that bind us together and to destroy every trace of common ground and brotherhood between us.
Values we all once shared that were intended to do the most good for the most people are being maliciously torched in the name of discord and disunity by utilizing a reality denying, mentally ill, family destroying, child warping, depraved ideology.
The globablists’ have successfully utilized the Red vs Blue, East vs West, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed, Boy vs Girl dichotomies to exploit our innate tribal nature, and in doing so are dividing and conquering us. This ‘us-vs-them’ separation makes us easy to control and direct with simple angry thoughts about “the enemy” who isn’t really our enemy – while blinding us to the actual enemy behind the curtain pulling the puppet strings. If we could collectively recognize this for what it is the NWO wouldn’t stand a chance.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer. The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
They know that politicization is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
United we will stand, divided we will fall, our adversaries know this which is why we are being mercilessly divided.
Yes, yes, yes. I've said and written this although not so well. It's all about division and isolation, fear and fight.
I had a text in college, The Nazi Seizure of Power, The Experience Of A Single German Town, 1922-1945, William Sheridan Allen. I think it is the guide for everything being done the last years. (My professor was a genius and I didn't realize it until our final when his test was one question, "Does the end justify the means?" Explain. I was a junior and boy howdy, that was the hardest exam I ever had but I was fortunately prepared by my parents, my church, a few former teachers, and my love of history.) Anyway, I'm now watching Night and Fog, and The Sorrow and the Pity both of which deal with similar issues.
It is a complicated human psychological, social, spiritual issue for people to stand for truth when not only their comfort, status, way of life is threatened, but their livelihood, health, ability to obtain food, medical care, shelter, a safe place to be, their family, their friends, their pets, their future, their extended relatives, things far beyond themselves are threatened and they have seen the actual results of those threats. People believe if they are silent, if they "haven't done anything wrong", if they comply, if they shrink into the background, they won't be noticed. They hope to protect themselves.
But eventually everyone is attacked, even the ones who have been at the top, everyone is suspect. Because these people don't know history, are uneducated, they think they can protect themselves, but over and over again there's a Brutus, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, a Cassius, a Kim Jong Un, The Night of the Long Knives. The end doesn't justify the means because a right thing must be done in a right way to be right. Nothing else but the truth matters.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Thank you. Yes. People don't realize how very close we are. I don't know if there are enough who would rise up anymore. Few even will explain the real reason for our being given the Second Amendment, so I'm not sure if they would insist on government fulfilling their oath to the Constitution and the People. It's been a lot that's been thrown at us in a very clear manner in the last 3+ years, a war we didn't expect. It's important to encourage each other to not wear out because it will be a long one. They try to win by wearing everyone down. Keep moving forward.
“Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas.”... Very true.. yet how idiotic. Who (when they actually think about it) believes any of the political class is advocating for them?
Excellent. However if we don't beat it, push it back, stand agianst it, and educate people we are doomed. This is the best speech I've ever heard on the issue. I never spend 30 minutes on videos but a couple times a year. I have watched this one 3x.
Gosh. It REALLY REALLY IS! IT BLEW MY MIND. He told me everything I already knew BUT didn't really know. I had all the pieces to the puzzle but they were not together. Now they are.
I appreciate that Lindsay so succinctly explains that Critical Theory is an offshoot/iteration of Marxism, that's something everyone should know, but that he also touches on something absolutely pivotal, which is WHY this tentacle (which has gone on to infect everything) actually formed.
Basically, Marx's ideas had been kicking around for a while, and growing in the very fertile ground of economic hardship that followed WW1. During the following decades the socialists in Europe became increasingly frustrated when the progress of their movement began to stall. Gramsci in particular expresses in his writings his deep frustration and concern — socialism was doing well in Italy, and then suddenly Mussolini kicks the air out of the tires and threatens the entire movement.
And Gramsci was astute enough to understand why fascism was such a threat; essentially the socialist pitch to the working classes was "we will seize the means of production, and then we - the workers - will administrate / run everything". Mussolini realised something they did not, and moved past socialism, taking the workers with him. He offered the workers a better pitch: ""we will seize the means of production, and then I will [do the hard bit] of administrating / running everything ...but I'll do it for the benefit of the workers". So clever. Mussolini pitched the workers socialism, with less personal effort / input.
Gramsci and the Soviets conferred, and came to the conclusion that the people had failed them, because they were still not in the right mode of consciousness. Clearly these dumb people were trapped in their counterproductive modes of thought, and thus, the revolution was going to need to be much more radical than their Phase 1 efforts. Thus, the much more explicitly radical Marxist offshoot "Critical Theory" was born, and grew with the writings of Horkheimer and Marcuse, etc. The people had failed them, and thus it was not going to be sufficient to seize the means of production, it was going to be necessary to bring revolution to every sphere of life, and into the hearts and minds of the people themselves.
Scary in the sense that this thinking would produce a much more *total* totalitarianism if it were fully implemented. At the same time, it's greatly useful to know and understand WHY they're teaching kids to be "queer" and trying to change the date of America's founding, or what pronouns people use — all these things that ostensibly seem quite arbitrary and unrelated, are in fact all fronts of the same war, the same revolution to capture the minds of the people and fundamentally bring about a revolution *within man* such that he doesn't fail the socialists and disappoint them again, jeopardising the whole revolution.
Nice summary. And to your point "total" totalitarianism is exceedingly more possible because of being chipped and tracked anywhere in the world. And Elon is the man of the people a free speech advocate? SMH. Elon was MADE by the government. We are told carbon credits in part will be one way they control us. Who is the biggest seller of carbon credits on earth today? ELON MUSK. AND Starlink will track you to the ends of the earth!?? Elon too. We are living the Terminator movie that James Cameron wrote and what's he about? Well he's a Green guy, a no meat guy. He was probably told this was coming hence the scirpt. Much like Kubrick in his space Odyessy movies and the thought he was the one that faked the moon landing but in reverse. The moon landing came first then the movie. Terminator came first then the reality of it coming to fruition?
So my point? "Total Totalitarism" has never been before as possible as it is today because of technology.
I really hope we can intro more people to James Lindsay and his New Discourses lectures and podcasts.
He really is excellent at explaining what is going on, and which tactics are being used (and hence, which responses are futile/counterproductive). His elucidation of the concept of 'mid level violence' is particularly worth the time.
This is very good stuff, though I'm sure everyone is tired of theories on "wokeness." I had to unfollow guys like Auron MacIntyre who are genuinely obsessed with this question, as if it were some difficult to understand phenomenon, despite the fact that "woke" presents itself as thinly veiled anti-white hatred coupled with a demand for wealth transfer from the native middle class to the various complainants. You don't have to read Judy Butler, Franz Fanon, or Kimberly Crenshaw (perish the thought) to understand this stuff
Its content is mostly just obfuscatory; more than any leftist system we've seen thus far, it masquerades as an intellectual system while being mostly hollow. I guess this is an expression of the cognitive bankruptcy of its proponents, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
They're probably not bright enough to understand it, but there's a perverse honesty to their vapidity. If all there is, is power, towards the taking of which all language games ultimately reduce, then why bother being intellectually rigorous? Their unprincipled discourse is completely consistent with their foundational assumptions.
Is Woke an independent agent, or a tool? If a tool, then they are not an enemy in their own right and can't turn on each other. They are only the product of a funding stream managed by the real enemy.
Traditional Marxism was also like that. I remember how leftists used to brag about how they used the scientific method while conservatives didn't.
Of course it wasn't true then, as it is not true now.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was no longer possible to continue pretending that they were right. So they had to change their tactics.
They have adjusted their message. There are still oppressors and oppressed. That is the core of the Marxist ideology. But now they have replaced the social class, which is subject to social mobility, with more permanent qualities. They maintain their goal, which is absolute control of society.
Wokeness is an opaqueness, or shadow that has been casted onto reality. Like evil, it is not something to be fought directly, but exposed through the light of awakened truth and human connection.
Wokeness is almost exclusively Anglophone, just like early Nicene trinitarianism was almost exclusively Greek. Instruments of imperial cultural domination over periphery, they both.
If you wanted to discuss perichoresis, hypostasis or rights of castrates, you had to learn Greek.
If you want to discuss misogynoir, intersectionality or trans rights, you have to learn English.
Therefore, things will change when another Rome, an alternative center of cultural attraction appears; I sincerely hope it will not take the form of Chinese constructing their own version of Wokeness.
The strange thing in the current high-low alliance is that the low isn't really aware of the alliance, and for the high it seems to be a bit of a joke.
But the middleclass, which is the patsy in the middle, is the strongest supporter of the woke.
Here in Germany this is very well illustrated by the success of the Greens, which are mostly supported by the affluent middle class: those who will lose the most if the Greens are successful.
I think the main limiting factor will be withdrawal of participation, which as you note is likely to be decisive. As the existing pool of talented scholars are driven out or simply walk away, their places are necessarily taken by the talentless. Institutional prestige is in the final analysis a function of popular perception that the institutions are concentrations of skilled intellect. Ultimately the institutions will be seen as flocks of midwits, and their prestige will turn into a joke. The public will tune them out, students will stop attending, and ultimately even state funding will dry up as the juice won't be worth the squeeze. We're already in the early stages of that.
Another factor that will end woke will be elite circulation. Those who wish to replace the current high will make an alliance with the low created by woke policies, which will destabilize the current regime. I suspect the emerging, still largely implicit alliance between tech bro billionaires and renegade right wing Internet influencers points to one aspect of the new elite alliance - providing the commerical and intellectual legs, the only remaining component being military. Popular support via populist policies aimed at the repressed native populations of Western countries provides the low component.
In the US, and indeed in most of the West, the post-WW2 rise and expansion of middle classes have been a great stabilizing force and had (I thought) all but eliminated the possibility of using the shrinking lower classes as tools of oppression. But since the 90s I've watched as ruling-class fiends like Soros, the WEF, the Koch brothers, etc. have encouraged illegal immigration in order to gain potential new allies (and cheap labor) in their war on the middle class. Since they had also gained control of the media and the major political parties, they have been able to squelch popular opposition to these destructive policies.
But . . . look who is leading the opposition to Wokery! Some of these very same immigrants sent to take our jobs and de-stabilize our cities are actually the ones openly demanding a right to worship their Gods and get trans-genderism out of the public schools. I can't predict how any of this will turn out, but I don't think it's going to turn out the way Soros & Co. planned it.
Middle class are those who developed enough to replace the owners of corporations and manage production themselves. This is the real reason oligarchy wage the war against middle class.
Jan '14, I read a paper discussing the how of WASPs' (and this is my culture--husband and I are Mayflower babies) loss of power--that in 19th C. they had encouraged great immigration to man their factories. Unfortunately, I never found that paper again--computer history was no help.
I've been teaching European history for a couple of years now, and this is the best, most succinct explanation of political history I've ever seen. Thank you! It combines history, anthropology, human psychology and communication technology in one neat package. Congratulations!
Having a lifelong interest in European and American history, I recognized eugyppius as a unique talent just by perusing the titles of his essays. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he's a good stylist and can connect the dots like no one else. This is my favorite Substack.
A fascinating lens on Woke-ism and one utterly distinct from my own personal reading. I can't say if I disagree or not, because I don't tend to see Woke-ism through the lens of a power struggle the same way you do, E.
But my initial thought is scepticism. For me, Woke-ism is much more the bastard child of postmodernism (see here for further explanation: http://grahamstull.com/2022/12/05/is-woke-really-a-thing-and-if-so-where-did-it-come-from/ ). It may disturb existing power structures in the short term, but ultimately is not necessarily incompatible with them. For me, its salient feature is rather that it values the subjective experience over objective reality. As such, it can never be solidly anchored to anything (because subjectivity is a constantly shifting wind) and is doomed to crash against the hard walls of reality sooner or later. The question is how much damage it does to society on the way there. A more profound question is perhaps whether or not we can simultaneously enjoy a level of prosperity that decouples us from harsh physical constraints, and yet maintain a rigorous, dogmatic / religious architecture that is grounded in the laws of nature.
I think we should expect Woke to be broadly compatible with existing power structures, because its purpose is to extend their reach, rather than to upset them. The focus on subjectivity I think is very important, and reveals how in-demand low-side allies currently are. Suggests the social revolution Woke represents is a little top-heavy, maybe.
I see woke crashing in on itself as the proponents outdo each other attempting to become even more woke. Seems a destructive effort to realign thinking in a useless direction
Wokeness is part of the bigger picture of the cycles of civilization. This type of garbage comes along - as with rampant corruption, bureacracy, sexual perversion - when a society is in its final phase before disintegration. Hopefully, it will usher its own demise and we can build something better to replace it.
As in, after Anheuser-Busch felt the result of its ad campaign, you might think other CEO's would look critically at their own up-coming campaigns and pull the questionable before put into action. But no. So Target. Now Kohl's. It will be fun to see who's next to fall.
In the book that is entitled "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" Prof. Mattias Desmet reveals a flaw in the thinking of the exponents of wokeness that can be exploited in defeating them. This is that they are reductionists, that is, people who believe there is no such thing as a "complex system." This belief is, however, false. To defeat them, we must achieve widespread understanding that this belief is false. How to fund this effort is an unsolved problem.
Dessert also says that it’s about 30% of a population that buys the BS ideology, 65% who are afraid to question it, and 5% who do question it. And it’s this last 5% that makes or breaks the movement. He says it only takes the 5% to keep questioning the narrative, and this has, historically, been all it takes to stop a totalitarian movement. Keep up the dialogue!!!
They are then the logical end point of western scientific thinking which, even though it has the means to recognise that the world is complex, largely ignores that truth in its teaching or its proselytising. Look at the 'climate crisis' to see how no complexity has ever been allowed to sully the simplistic theology of CO2=bad.
The wokeism will be completely destroyed if the people will demand nationalisation of enterprises and abolishment of capitalists and their Church called WEF. Then the Woke will disappear overnight.
I would differ on the definition. Religion = ideology = belief system with an attitude. It's very important, especially in America, to understand that WEF/Woke/Marxism etc. is religion. The First Amendment prohibits an established religion. That would apply particularly to any tax-funded educational institution.
The argument made by the WEF resembles. the argument made by the Marxists in the respect of promising a utopia to people who submit to totalitarian rule over themselves by the WEF. This promise is delivered by the WEF in the book "Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari describes this book as a "history of the future" but for it to be a history of the future, an historian would have to travel into the future at a speed exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum for the purpose of observing the outcomes of the events of the future and this cannot happen under Einstein's well tested Theory of Relativity. The argument made by the Marxists suffers from the same shortcoming.
Fascinating observations! Another interesting take on Wokeism comes from James Lindsay, who views it as a revival of the old Gnostic religion, reshaped via Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, and put into praxis by Mao and Marcuse. In his words, Wokeism is Americanized Maoism.
So did the Russkis. In my growing years (50's, 60's) we regularly heard of Komsomol, Young Pioneers with their red neckerchiefs, school teachers encouraging children to speak of what they hear their parents discussing at home.
"...the institutions which Wokeness seizes will be worse in every way once the revolution is complete, and all of us in our own small way can contribute to their decline by withdrawing our efforts and attention from them."
Sure. The only problem is that these institutions include our governments, our militaries, higher education, lower education, major corporations, technology ventures, ... I do now want them to fail, but the result will be chaos, revolution, and lots of blood.
I like to think of myself as a crusty, large, old, boomer gentleman, and I agree with everything you say.
But at some point, your civilization degenerates beyond repair, and it collapses. It happens to every civilization. It only happens once; but once is enough.
"Egypt" the area is still there, yes. Egypt the culture and people who were the egyptian civilisation until a few centuries AD?
Gone forever. Inter-marriage with other peoples, foreign cultural influences replacing their own, and finally having the last remnants swept away by the armies of islam and the arabs.
They are gone, never to exist again. Like the ugarit and many others before them.
The dearth of any true humorous sensibility in the realm of all the arts right now I think is a dangerous deficiency, because that quality makes one think as much as it makes one laugh. These university-age kids are really lacking in any sense of the joys of clever rudeness with an important underlying purpose. In my long-ago early adulthood humor magazines/comics etc. driven by current events were everywhere. Now all the comics etc. are just endless manga and superhero nonsense creating huge fanbases but no actual development of a personal sensibility about things that really go on in the world.
And any in the humor field still holding the line are pretty aged right now. John Cleese won't be around forever to keep "Life of Brian" pure.
Maybe we've got to do a lot less attempting to reason with any of these fools of any age and do a lot more laughing at them--at least in beginning the process of destabilization of their grip on things.
I expect a reversal of this mega-hustle rather soon. Since the countries of Western Civ are going bankrupt, higher education will be among the first institutions to downsize-or-die. Only the regime of ZIRP and financial fuckery has made possible the "money" for the gross expansion of diversity deanships and all the mischief they generate. The same is true of the government patronage hustle: no money to be had. This is usually overlooked, for some reason, just as the artificial intelligence mavens overlook the fragility of the electric grid.
It should be burned into our brains, this point that you made. Intellectually confronting wokeness is basically a waste of time
Depends on what the goal is. If it's to convince the woke using facts and logic, you're right - it's impossible, therefore pointless. If it's to use the woke as foils in order to demonstrate their intellectual vacuity and moral repugnance for onlookers, it can be highly effective. The point being to establish the opponents of woke as the actual intellectual elite, thereby in the long run rendering their control of academia irrelevant.
We never argue to "flip" the person we're arguing with, but instead to persuade the listeners (or readers) who are silently following along.
Humor and indifference are our best rhetorical weapons.
Does the emperor have any clothes? Initially I felt that people would ridicule the absurd but the reality is that people seem to fear the absurd and they willingly follow.
You should reread the original story The Emperor's New Clothes. When the emperor is revealed naked by the observant child, the crowd pauses, then keeps marching as if nothing happened.
There is no there there, which is why leftist shitbags can genuinely pull the "what even is wokeness" card when confronted on their various inanities
Yes--it reminds me of Neo-Nazis claiming they’re not racist. They have two versions of their credo--one for the indoctrinated, who know what’s up, and another for the shit-munching masses. Another good analogy is Bill Clinton’s “I smoked but didn’t inhale” comment. The morons believed him, and those hip to the culture knew he was joking.
What about doing it through satire and comedy? I'm serious. Check out my bud foundring:
https://twitter.com/foundring1/status/1621997604124131328
I've asked where are the fearless trial lawyers when we need them? You could also ask where are the fearless stand-up comedians? Who replaced George Carlin? Nobody.
The societal role of the comedian is to point out and to ridicule life's absurdities. Like you said, no one has replaced George Carlin, Richard Pryor ... Lenny Bruce. Too many have become simple court jesters.
Or the "socially-conscious" entertainers, the people who stand up to The Man. 99 percent of them became defenders of The Man. Those who didn't (like Vann Morrison) got to see which way the wind is really blowing these days.
We’ve mostly worn out and gone into hiding ... We’ve endured four decades of this war ... it’s the same war : fungible generations of whippersnappers but the same disambiguated cant.
Eugyppius’s caution here is much appreciated. Nonetheless, we know what’s going to happen. .
What would happen if 50 to 75 percent of the world's colleges were closed? If college became a place where only serious students attended? I can only think of a handful of vital professions where you really need a college degree.
But we can't close them or reduce the student count because practically the whole damn economy now depends on the "higher education complex." I live in a college town. What would happen to my town if Troy University closed shop? Trust me. Half the students at my alma mater don't need to be at college. As Eugyppius makes clear, the "teaching" or "scholarship" of most of the professors is irrelevant or counter-productive.
By now the Higher Education Complex, Military Industrial Complex and Science/Medical Complex are all too vast to shut down. We can throw in the "Government Complex." If you count federal, state and local governments, these departments must account for 35 percent of the jobs in America - 45 percent if you count vendors who depend on government contracts.
I think we will see more students and their parents decide that they can save the $100,000 tuition, room and board .... just as a common-sense "inflation work-around." I hope that in our Covid times more people have learned that the "best and brightest" in academia ... are obtuse. Surely some parents must be deciding, "We don't need those people to educate our child."
One way or another, the influence of these administrators and woke faculty members will be much smaller in the future.
Have you seen Ben Bankas in Canada? He’s a good one along these lines.
Excellent.
Have you seen Samson's 'Dear Fauci' one? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wqZ2oJCA7Q
Samson is SHARP! Like Eminem but set free to speak truth with extremely clever rap lyrics ... plus, he has a mullet
God damn - that one was hot sauce. Loved it. Thanks!
Exactly, Graham. It's the best weapon of all: laughter and contempt.
hysterical!
Excellent!
I find that a simple "That's nonsense." is the only response that is warranted.
I do think even if woke people and people brainwashed by this ideology aren't strong on independent skeptical thinking, every time I talk to (real) people (in the real world) and I just push for looking on some facts together, the discussion stops very fast, and their look like am just crazy and don't know what I am talking about vanishes from their face. They suddenly know, maybe it is them who haven't thought this through properly. They never talk about this in my presence again. This is a win! There is doubt now.
So I always argue to really convince the other side. Even if they don't show it, good arguments very often work, even if it takes time. It is like penetrating oil. Also it makes me a better debater. If I were to try to only show the onlookers that I am right, then I run the risk of trying to just embarrass the other side instead of just making honest good arguments. Doing that is not convincing onlookers very well.
As someone whose always been a “nice” person, I’m absolutely convinced that the way to battle wokeness (if such a thing can be done) is through ridicule. The Libsoftiktok and like accounts on Twitter, YouTube, and other media platforms are absolutely doing God’s work. You can’t fight it intellectually, you must expose the utter embarrassment and stupidity of it all.
No, that should not be burned into our brains at all. The opposite is true. It is important to speak out again and again and point fingers at inconsequential nonsense, lies, wrongness and inconsistencies. The forming of masses has to be interrupted as often as possible. Read Mathias Desmet.
Having plenty of time to waste, I will gladly confront wokeness at every opportunity.
You go Danno! Me too. Laughter is the best medicine.
Why confront Wokeness "intellectually"? It's far more effective to laugh at the Wokesters, boycott their endeavours and by pass them wherever possible.
One of the main aims of intellectual confrontation of wokeness must be to provide the ablest Christian children and young people, from whom the future leadership of the Church will be drawn, with arguments sufficient to persuade themselves not to join in with the Wokerie.
A primary tentpole of this takeover is to dumb us down to the lowest common denominator. Experienced and educated critical thinkers make for poor slaves. Old ways of thinking have to be eradicated. Division, demoralization, and the destruction of education are three key tools in achieving total domination.
Bread (UBI/SNAP), circuses (media), overbearing propaganda (news), fabricating and dramatically magnifying our differences (5th generation warfare), and radicalizing the populace (politics) are all being brought to bear against us:
By weaponizing woke ideology, a powerful group is destroying the modern world by poisoning the wells we all share of comradery, fellowship, and family – they are doing everything they can to decimate the ties that bind us together and to destroy every trace of common ground and brotherhood between us.
Values we all once shared that were intended to do the most good for the most people are being maliciously torched in the name of discord and disunity by utilizing a reality denying, mentally ill, family destroying, child warping, depraved ideology.
The globablists’ have successfully utilized the Red vs Blue, East vs West, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed, Boy vs Girl dichotomies to exploit our innate tribal nature, and in doing so are dividing and conquering us. This ‘us-vs-them’ separation makes us easy to control and direct with simple angry thoughts about “the enemy” who isn’t really our enemy – while blinding us to the actual enemy behind the curtain pulling the puppet strings. If we could collectively recognize this for what it is the NWO wouldn’t stand a chance.
Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas. This is why Republican vs Democrat equals divide and conquer. The human mind is binary. Our thought process can often be boiled down into terms (often ultimatums) of – this or that – and our adversaries understand - very well - the art of this war.
They know that politicization is so effective at manipulating us because most emotionally connect their personal belief system to the belief system of their political party, and so then any attack on their party – legitimate or otherwise – is interpreted by their brain as an attack on themselves. Reason and logic then jump out the nearest window as raw emotion takes the helm, thus making them even more susceptible to the predatory controlling influences.
United we will stand, divided we will fall, our adversaries know this which is why we are being mercilessly divided.
https://tritorch.com/united
Yes, yes, yes. I've said and written this although not so well. It's all about division and isolation, fear and fight.
I had a text in college, The Nazi Seizure of Power, The Experience Of A Single German Town, 1922-1945, William Sheridan Allen. I think it is the guide for everything being done the last years. (My professor was a genius and I didn't realize it until our final when his test was one question, "Does the end justify the means?" Explain. I was a junior and boy howdy, that was the hardest exam I ever had but I was fortunately prepared by my parents, my church, a few former teachers, and my love of history.) Anyway, I'm now watching Night and Fog, and The Sorrow and the Pity both of which deal with similar issues.
It is a complicated human psychological, social, spiritual issue for people to stand for truth when not only their comfort, status, way of life is threatened, but their livelihood, health, ability to obtain food, medical care, shelter, a safe place to be, their family, their friends, their pets, their future, their extended relatives, things far beyond themselves are threatened and they have seen the actual results of those threats. People believe if they are silent, if they "haven't done anything wrong", if they comply, if they shrink into the background, they won't be noticed. They hope to protect themselves.
But eventually everyone is attacked, even the ones who have been at the top, everyone is suspect. Because these people don't know history, are uneducated, they think they can protect themselves, but over and over again there's a Brutus, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, a Cassius, a Kim Jong Un, The Night of the Long Knives. The end doesn't justify the means because a right thing must be done in a right way to be right. Nothing else but the truth matters.
Very well said. Your words brought this to mind:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
First they came for ... but I was not ...
Thank you. Yes. People don't realize how very close we are. I don't know if there are enough who would rise up anymore. Few even will explain the real reason for our being given the Second Amendment, so I'm not sure if they would insist on government fulfilling their oath to the Constitution and the People. It's been a lot that's been thrown at us in a very clear manner in the last 3+ years, a war we didn't expect. It's important to encourage each other to not wear out because it will be a long one. They try to win by wearing everyone down. Keep moving forward.
“Most people will not act to secure their future, so long as they feel they have an advocate fighting for them in the public or political arenas.”... Very true.. yet how idiotic. Who (when they actually think about it) believes any of the political class is advocating for them?
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Way way better than the article.
Excellent. However if we don't beat it, push it back, stand agianst it, and educate people we are doomed. This is the best speech I've ever heard on the issue. I never spend 30 minutes on videos but a couple times a year. I have watched this one 3x.
https://rumble.com/v2lkqbk-one-of-the-most-important-speeches-made-in-the-eu-parliament.-james-lindsay.html
Agreed.
I watched Dr. Lindsay's speech for the first time last week, and then again this week.
Absolutely brilliant!
Gosh. It REALLY REALLY IS! IT BLEW MY MIND. He told me everything I already knew BUT didn't really know. I had all the pieces to the puzzle but they were not together. Now they are.
I appreciate that Lindsay so succinctly explains that Critical Theory is an offshoot/iteration of Marxism, that's something everyone should know, but that he also touches on something absolutely pivotal, which is WHY this tentacle (which has gone on to infect everything) actually formed.
Basically, Marx's ideas had been kicking around for a while, and growing in the very fertile ground of economic hardship that followed WW1. During the following decades the socialists in Europe became increasingly frustrated when the progress of their movement began to stall. Gramsci in particular expresses in his writings his deep frustration and concern — socialism was doing well in Italy, and then suddenly Mussolini kicks the air out of the tires and threatens the entire movement.
And Gramsci was astute enough to understand why fascism was such a threat; essentially the socialist pitch to the working classes was "we will seize the means of production, and then we - the workers - will administrate / run everything". Mussolini realised something they did not, and moved past socialism, taking the workers with him. He offered the workers a better pitch: ""we will seize the means of production, and then I will [do the hard bit] of administrating / running everything ...but I'll do it for the benefit of the workers". So clever. Mussolini pitched the workers socialism, with less personal effort / input.
Gramsci and the Soviets conferred, and came to the conclusion that the people had failed them, because they were still not in the right mode of consciousness. Clearly these dumb people were trapped in their counterproductive modes of thought, and thus, the revolution was going to need to be much more radical than their Phase 1 efforts. Thus, the much more explicitly radical Marxist offshoot "Critical Theory" was born, and grew with the writings of Horkheimer and Marcuse, etc. The people had failed them, and thus it was not going to be sufficient to seize the means of production, it was going to be necessary to bring revolution to every sphere of life, and into the hearts and minds of the people themselves.
Scary in the sense that this thinking would produce a much more *total* totalitarianism if it were fully implemented. At the same time, it's greatly useful to know and understand WHY they're teaching kids to be "queer" and trying to change the date of America's founding, or what pronouns people use — all these things that ostensibly seem quite arbitrary and unrelated, are in fact all fronts of the same war, the same revolution to capture the minds of the people and fundamentally bring about a revolution *within man* such that he doesn't fail the socialists and disappoint them again, jeopardising the whole revolution.
Nice summary. And to your point "total" totalitarianism is exceedingly more possible because of being chipped and tracked anywhere in the world. And Elon is the man of the people a free speech advocate? SMH. Elon was MADE by the government. We are told carbon credits in part will be one way they control us. Who is the biggest seller of carbon credits on earth today? ELON MUSK. AND Starlink will track you to the ends of the earth!?? Elon too. We are living the Terminator movie that James Cameron wrote and what's he about? Well he's a Green guy, a no meat guy. He was probably told this was coming hence the scirpt. Much like Kubrick in his space Odyessy movies and the thought he was the one that faked the moon landing but in reverse. The moon landing came first then the movie. Terminator came first then the reality of it coming to fruition?
So my point? "Total Totalitarism" has never been before as possible as it is today because of technology.
I really hope we can intro more people to James Lindsay and his New Discourses lectures and podcasts.
He really is excellent at explaining what is going on, and which tactics are being used (and hence, which responses are futile/counterproductive). His elucidation of the concept of 'mid level violence' is particularly worth the time.
I absolutely agree. I need to meet this man and get more involved. I need direction.
Don't we all!
... and for those who don't know where to find his work (and podcasts) - https://newdiscourses.com/
Thank you!
I have subscribed.
Ah!!!! I didn't know!!! Thank you!!!
For the YouTube averse, here is the same speech on Rumble:
https://rumble.com/v2lkqbk-one-of-the-most-important-speeches-made-in-the-eu-parliament.-james-lindsay.html
Much better thank you.
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That was great, very enlightening. Thanks for sharing it!
Excellent. Pass this link to everyone.
This is very good stuff, though I'm sure everyone is tired of theories on "wokeness." I had to unfollow guys like Auron MacIntyre who are genuinely obsessed with this question, as if it were some difficult to understand phenomenon, despite the fact that "woke" presents itself as thinly veiled anti-white hatred coupled with a demand for wealth transfer from the native middle class to the various complainants. You don't have to read Judy Butler, Franz Fanon, or Kimberly Crenshaw (perish the thought) to understand this stuff
Its content is mostly just obfuscatory; more than any leftist system we've seen thus far, it masquerades as an intellectual system while being mostly hollow. I guess this is an expression of the cognitive bankruptcy of its proponents, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
They're probably not bright enough to understand it, but there's a perverse honesty to their vapidity. If all there is, is power, towards the taking of which all language games ultimately reduce, then why bother being intellectually rigorous? Their unprincipled discourse is completely consistent with their foundational assumptions.
But what will happen once the Woke get power? Don’t they become their own enemy right away?
Is Woke an independent agent, or a tool? If a tool, then they are not an enemy in their own right and can't turn on each other. They are only the product of a funding stream managed by the real enemy.
Steve Sailer is good on this topic (as he is with everything except COVID, honestly):
https://www.unz.com/isteve/black-women-intellectuals-dont-seem-all-that-intellectual/
The top comment is gold: "Perhaps as an echo of the treatment of enslaved black bodies, she takes a metaphor and flogs it to death."
Traditional Marxism was also like that. I remember how leftists used to brag about how they used the scientific method while conservatives didn't.
Of course it wasn't true then, as it is not true now.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was no longer possible to continue pretending that they were right. So they had to change their tactics.
They have adjusted their message. There are still oppressors and oppressed. That is the core of the Marxist ideology. But now they have replaced the social class, which is subject to social mobility, with more permanent qualities. They maintain their goal, which is absolute control of society.
Wokeness is an opaqueness, or shadow that has been casted onto reality. Like evil, it is not something to be fought directly, but exposed through the light of awakened truth and human connection.
Wokeness is almost exclusively Anglophone, just like early Nicene trinitarianism was almost exclusively Greek. Instruments of imperial cultural domination over periphery, they both.
If you wanted to discuss perichoresis, hypostasis or rights of castrates, you had to learn Greek.
If you want to discuss misogynoir, intersectionality or trans rights, you have to learn English.
Therefore, things will change when another Rome, an alternative center of cultural attraction appears; I sincerely hope it will not take the form of Chinese constructing their own version of Wokeness.
(edit: spelling of 'misogynoir' (sad_lol))
The parallels with the theological (and later, ecclesiological) developments in Christianity are spot on, and a thing I've thought about a lot.
And labelling everything outside that Greek mindset as heresy. How many of those were there in late Antiquity?
Right, wokeness is totally came from from US soil.
The strange thing in the current high-low alliance is that the low isn't really aware of the alliance, and for the high it seems to be a bit of a joke.
But the middleclass, which is the patsy in the middle, is the strongest supporter of the woke.
Here in Germany this is very well illustrated by the success of the Greens, which are mostly supported by the affluent middle class: those who will lose the most if the Greens are successful.
I think the main limiting factor will be withdrawal of participation, which as you note is likely to be decisive. As the existing pool of talented scholars are driven out or simply walk away, their places are necessarily taken by the talentless. Institutional prestige is in the final analysis a function of popular perception that the institutions are concentrations of skilled intellect. Ultimately the institutions will be seen as flocks of midwits, and their prestige will turn into a joke. The public will tune them out, students will stop attending, and ultimately even state funding will dry up as the juice won't be worth the squeeze. We're already in the early stages of that.
Another factor that will end woke will be elite circulation. Those who wish to replace the current high will make an alliance with the low created by woke policies, which will destabilize the current regime. I suspect the emerging, still largely implicit alliance between tech bro billionaires and renegade right wing Internet influencers points to one aspect of the new elite alliance - providing the commerical and intellectual legs, the only remaining component being military. Popular support via populist policies aimed at the repressed native populations of Western countries provides the low component.
In the US, and indeed in most of the West, the post-WW2 rise and expansion of middle classes have been a great stabilizing force and had (I thought) all but eliminated the possibility of using the shrinking lower classes as tools of oppression. But since the 90s I've watched as ruling-class fiends like Soros, the WEF, the Koch brothers, etc. have encouraged illegal immigration in order to gain potential new allies (and cheap labor) in their war on the middle class. Since they had also gained control of the media and the major political parties, they have been able to squelch popular opposition to these destructive policies.
But . . . look who is leading the opposition to Wokery! Some of these very same immigrants sent to take our jobs and de-stabilize our cities are actually the ones openly demanding a right to worship their Gods and get trans-genderism out of the public schools. I can't predict how any of this will turn out, but I don't think it's going to turn out the way Soros & Co. planned it.
Middle class are those who developed enough to replace the owners of corporations and manage production themselves. This is the real reason oligarchy wage the war against middle class.
Excellent comment.
Jan '14, I read a paper discussing the how of WASPs' (and this is my culture--husband and I are Mayflower babies) loss of power--that in 19th C. they had encouraged great immigration to man their factories. Unfortunately, I never found that paper again--computer history was no help.
Hidden by the censorship industrial complex?
Don't think it was doing that then?
I've been teaching European history for a couple of years now, and this is the best, most succinct explanation of political history I've ever seen. Thank you! It combines history, anthropology, human psychology and communication technology in one neat package. Congratulations!
Cathy Hines
Payson Arizona
Having a lifelong interest in European and American history, I recognized eugyppius as a unique talent just by perusing the titles of his essays. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he's a good stylist and can connect the dots like no one else. This is my favorite Substack.
A fascinating lens on Woke-ism and one utterly distinct from my own personal reading. I can't say if I disagree or not, because I don't tend to see Woke-ism through the lens of a power struggle the same way you do, E.
But my initial thought is scepticism. For me, Woke-ism is much more the bastard child of postmodernism (see here for further explanation: http://grahamstull.com/2022/12/05/is-woke-really-a-thing-and-if-so-where-did-it-come-from/ ). It may disturb existing power structures in the short term, but ultimately is not necessarily incompatible with them. For me, its salient feature is rather that it values the subjective experience over objective reality. As such, it can never be solidly anchored to anything (because subjectivity is a constantly shifting wind) and is doomed to crash against the hard walls of reality sooner or later. The question is how much damage it does to society on the way there. A more profound question is perhaps whether or not we can simultaneously enjoy a level of prosperity that decouples us from harsh physical constraints, and yet maintain a rigorous, dogmatic / religious architecture that is grounded in the laws of nature.
I think we should expect Woke to be broadly compatible with existing power structures, because its purpose is to extend their reach, rather than to upset them. The focus on subjectivity I think is very important, and reveals how in-demand low-side allies currently are. Suggests the social revolution Woke represents is a little top-heavy, maybe.
I see woke crashing in on itself as the proponents outdo each other attempting to become even more woke. Seems a destructive effort to realign thinking in a useless direction
Wokeness is part of the bigger picture of the cycles of civilization. This type of garbage comes along - as with rampant corruption, bureacracy, sexual perversion - when a society is in its final phase before disintegration. Hopefully, it will usher its own demise and we can build something better to replace it.
As in, after Anheuser-Busch felt the result of its ad campaign, you might think other CEO's would look critically at their own up-coming campaigns and pull the questionable before put into action. But no. So Target. Now Kohl's. It will be fun to see who's next to fall.
I do hope that destructive fads fail, and quickly. I sense the public is seeing too much nonsense
You must watch the “Meow Meow Beans” episode of “Community.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments
In the book that is entitled "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" Prof. Mattias Desmet reveals a flaw in the thinking of the exponents of wokeness that can be exploited in defeating them. This is that they are reductionists, that is, people who believe there is no such thing as a "complex system." This belief is, however, false. To defeat them, we must achieve widespread understanding that this belief is false. How to fund this effort is an unsolved problem.
Dessert also says that it’s about 30% of a population that buys the BS ideology, 65% who are afraid to question it, and 5% who do question it. And it’s this last 5% that makes or breaks the movement. He says it only takes the 5% to keep questioning the narrative, and this has, historically, been all it takes to stop a totalitarian movement. Keep up the dialogue!!!
Dessert=Desmet. Darned spellcheck!
They are then the logical end point of western scientific thinking which, even though it has the means to recognise that the world is complex, largely ignores that truth in its teaching or its proselytising. Look at the 'climate crisis' to see how no complexity has ever been allowed to sully the simplistic theology of CO2=bad.
The wokeism will be completely destroyed if the people will demand nationalisation of enterprises and abolishment of capitalists and their Church called WEF. Then the Woke will disappear overnight.
To call WEF a "church is a contradiction in terms.
I would differ on the definition. Religion = ideology = belief system with an attitude. It's very important, especially in America, to understand that WEF/Woke/Marxism etc. is religion. The First Amendment prohibits an established religion. That would apply particularly to any tax-funded educational institution.
The argument made by the WEF resembles. the argument made by the Marxists in the respect of promising a utopia to people who submit to totalitarian rule over themselves by the WEF. This promise is delivered by the WEF in the book "Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari describes this book as a "history of the future" but for it to be a history of the future, an historian would have to travel into the future at a speed exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum for the purpose of observing the outcomes of the events of the future and this cannot happen under Einstein's well tested Theory of Relativity. The argument made by the Marxists suffers from the same shortcoming.
Fascinating observations! Another interesting take on Wokeism comes from James Lindsay, who views it as a revival of the old Gnostic religion, reshaped via Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, and put into praxis by Mao and Marcuse. In his words, Wokeism is Americanized Maoism.
excellent perspective; wokism as Maoism.
Mao used the schools to enforce identity politics , just as the gender transition is being pushed.
the point is to destroy the civilization from within and create a generation of slaves to the state.
The agenda is slavery and China is the model.
So did the Russkis. In my growing years (50's, 60's) we regularly heard of Komsomol, Young Pioneers with their red neckerchiefs, school teachers encouraging children to speak of what they hear their parents discussing at home.
"...the institutions which Wokeness seizes will be worse in every way once the revolution is complete, and all of us in our own small way can contribute to their decline by withdrawing our efforts and attention from them."
Sure. The only problem is that these institutions include our governments, our militaries, higher education, lower education, major corporations, technology ventures, ... I do now want them to fail, but the result will be chaos, revolution, and lots of blood.
There will be an effort to reel it in before it goes that far. If they fail, their heads will be the first on the block.
I pray that you are right, and that the reeling will reasonably succeed. But it is hard to be optimistic.
I like to think of myself as a crusty, large, old, boomer gentleman, and I agree with everything you say.
But at some point, your civilization degenerates beyond repair, and it collapses. It happens to every civilization. It only happens once; but once is enough.
I did warn you - crusty! ;)
"Egypt" the area is still there, yes. Egypt the culture and people who were the egyptian civilisation until a few centuries AD?
Gone forever. Inter-marriage with other peoples, foreign cultural influences replacing their own, and finally having the last remnants swept away by the armies of islam and the arabs.
They are gone, never to exist again. Like the ugarit and many others before them.
A very good piece.
The dearth of any true humorous sensibility in the realm of all the arts right now I think is a dangerous deficiency, because that quality makes one think as much as it makes one laugh. These university-age kids are really lacking in any sense of the joys of clever rudeness with an important underlying purpose. In my long-ago early adulthood humor magazines/comics etc. driven by current events were everywhere. Now all the comics etc. are just endless manga and superhero nonsense creating huge fanbases but no actual development of a personal sensibility about things that really go on in the world.
And any in the humor field still holding the line are pretty aged right now. John Cleese won't be around forever to keep "Life of Brian" pure.
Maybe we've got to do a lot less attempting to reason with any of these fools of any age and do a lot more laughing at them--at least in beginning the process of destabilization of their grip on things.
You know John Cleese had his mic taken away when he asked for repatriations from 1066.
Ha! Just went and read about that.
And let’s keep the Loretta scene in Life of Brian!
https://youtu.be/jlo7YZW8vPA
I expect a reversal of this mega-hustle rather soon. Since the countries of Western Civ are going bankrupt, higher education will be among the first institutions to downsize-or-die. Only the regime of ZIRP and financial fuckery has made possible the "money" for the gross expansion of diversity deanships and all the mischief they generate. The same is true of the government patronage hustle: no money to be had. This is usually overlooked, for some reason, just as the artificial intelligence mavens overlook the fragility of the electric grid.