This is a description of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 from WB Maxwell’s Victorian novel Vivien:

Another round of #MeTootery was unleashed on the unsuspecting public regarding a writer called Neil Gaiman.

The writer who is being #MeTooted sounds like a right bastard. The women accusing him go straight from “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” (a direct quote) to “It was rape!” All of the ingredients of the story are as they always are. A sleazy rich and famous man, overheated groupies eager to pleasure him in most disgusting ways, the accuser who pursues the male star aggressively for years but then is “pressured — from very diverse, mostly older women in her community — to take action that she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable taking.”

These are all icky people, and the story published about the in New York Magazine is badly written, rambling, and filled with very disgusting details of the affairs between Gaiman and the groupies. The reason why I’m even mentioning this is as follows. Gaiman is into BDSM. Liberals have spent years trying to convince us that it’s not a paraphilia but a variation on the norm. And it’s not. BDSM entails getting off on the pain and humiliation of others. The idea that this process has some sort of ironclad rules established by an utterly imaginary entity called “the BDSM community” is ridiculous. Here’s the author of the article, continuing in this vein to make BDSM sound tame and unobjectionable:

BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse.

Yes, the defining texts, totally. Sexual sadists are totally abiding by the “texts” written by sex educators. Marquis de Sade himself never veered from the rules set down by “practitioner Dossie.” It’s a mystery why the practice is even called after him instead of being named Dossieism.

“Consent” can’t guide our entire idea of sexual morality. And of you don’t like the word “morality”, take your objections to the New York Magazine, which is arguing sophomorically that there is good and bad BDSM, with the “good” variety being very arbitrarily defined by the article’s author.

What Gaiman did to the eager young groupie is disgusting and dehumanizing in spite of the fact that she enthusiastically consented, including in writing, many times. That she participated is also disgusting (read the article before you argue with my use of the word ‘disgusting.’ Or don’t because it really is.) She knew it and it weighed heavily with her because this pervy behavior wasn’t natural to her. She only engaged in it because she wanted a rich boyfriend.

First, liberals turned “consent” into a sacred cow, as if people didn’t consent all the time to things that are horrible for them. Now we have to witness their agonies of trying to untangle how this worship of consent leaves many people feeling abused, degraded, and broken.

As more AI-written texts flood the public space, people will feel an increasingly strong need to be certain that the texts they spend their time reading are written by actual humans. They will withhold trust and interest unless they are completely certain that they are reading human texts.

What people will look for is what we have here on the blog: the certainty that these are actual humans. And I don’t mean just me. It’s everybody who participates. Right now it seems like no big deal but soon enough it will be a mega big deal. Because all of a sudden we just won’t know. This will erode the social trust that is already at a low ebb.

Almost everything I saw on the woke left that I hated — the lemming-like groupthink, the embrace and promotion of weird conspiracies, the endless waxing and waning and birthing and rebirthing of moral panics, the refusal to leave the warm embrace of the echo chamber, the collective and ramshackle rationalizations, the cognitive rigidity, the refusal to even try to understand the actual(as opposed to imagined) motivations of people on the opposing side, the constant and deliberate abuse of language and terms with specific and accepted meanings to slur opponents who do not meet the definition of those terms, the revision of history so that it conforms to current belief systems and political goals, the cartoonish stereotypes of people in the out-group, the creepy ideas about gender and sex roles, the pressure on dissenters, the repetition of memes and the copy and pasting of boilerplate as a substitute for actual thought, the primitive tribalism, the authoritarian impulses, the psychological projection, the cults of personality, the resistance to the idea of a public university as an entity that champions truly free speech and open discourse, the tolerance for and refusal to criticize extreme actors in the in-group, the development of cults of personality, the social media childishness and tantrums, the auto-formation of opinions by reflexively forming one’s views on issues by simply taking the opposite position of one’s “enemies”, the informal enforcement on group unanimity, the ideologically-motivated selective interest and disinterest in scientific findings and statistical data, the elevation to prominence of the stupidest and most toxic figures, the astonishing and depressing illiteracy on what “free speech” means in a democratic society (both as it relates to 1A and as it doesn’t relate to 1A), the questioning of the legitimacy of long-standing important institutions when they take the “wrong” position, the enthusiastic support for morally bankrupt politicians, the open and unapologetic and explicit contempt for democracy, the hypocrisy and on and on — I now see on the antiwoke right.

https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1878815376370548979?t=rIE_wEQOiMjuk5NwhSEGEQ&s=19

Yeah, but the antiwoke right doesn’t run the Canadian Cancer Society, every institution of higher ed in the West, the FBI, Disney, etc. It runs absolutely nothing whatsoever except some social media accounts. An alt-right dude can insult me online but he can’t insult me at the doctor’s office. Or at work. He hasn’t passed any state laws that require my ritual humiliation in the workplace as a condition of me being able to make a living.

This guy I quoted is one of the best accounts on X but he doesn’t seem to understand a crucial thing. The problem isn’t what people believe. Everybody should believe what they want, including very lunatic things. If leftist people simply believed that it’s necessary to call a cervix a front hole, that would be a million times fine with me. This is America! People should expand intellectually to the very fringes of mega weirdness. If people want to get together and discuss how Putin is the savior of the West, the Holocaust never happened, and everybody who didn’t get exactly 37 COVID boosters will die immediately, they should. And if they want to call me names online for not believing all this, that’s fine, too.

Take Joyce Maynard. It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that her approach to life is the opposite of mine. But I very much want her to continue writing. She writes, I poke vicious fun, it’s all good. It’s America! What I don’t want is to be forced to proclaim at work that Joyce Maynard’s books are great or not great while my contingent workers’ contracts are held hostage.

Stereotypes, creepy ideas, insults and everything else he lists are perfectly fine. No, they are more than that. They are necessary. They are fine and even necessary as long as nobody is forced to listen, conform, and repeat. The woke left isn’t bad because it believes insane things. Everybody believes something other people find insane. There are people who think onion rings are tasty, and if that isn’t messed up, then I don’t know what is. The reason why the woke left is bad is because it’s been ramming their onion rings down everybody’s gullet with a hammer.

As I keep saying, avoid analogies. They almost never work. Except for the one with the onion rings. That one is brilliant.

When I saw the image, I thought it was St Louis. It’s always that empty. Hasn’t started booming yet because there’s nobody to boom. It’s just kind of dead.

NYC honking was iconic and a measure of how full of life the city was.

Also, I’ve got to say, $9 a day is not painful in every income category.

Not to be a purist, but isn’t “front hole” supposed to refer to the… well, something more front-positioned than the cervix?

I’m just worried these doctors will start looking for distanced cervixes at a great distance from where they tend to be located.

Yes, remember link enciclopedias? Good times. First, I used the Google link collector, and that was the most convenient one. Then Google discontinued it, and I moved to Feedly. It was not remotely as useful as the Google Reader but still functional.

Since then, however, technology moved on. I’m not even sure if Feedly exists anymore, for I haven’t accessed it in years. Its functions have been completely overtaken by X. And yes, Elon Musk’s positions on several very important issues are moronic and aggravating. And his personality is even more so. But he provides a crucial service with X. The pre-Elon Twitter didn’t provide it, at least not for people interested in what’s happening in Ukraine. Russian propaganda bots figured out the pre-Elon Twitter moderation policy and would destroy every pro-Ukrainian account in sight with complaints that we made them feel “unsafe.” It was a nightmare to keep getting shut down. On FB, it’s still the reign of Russian propagandists, which is why I’m never there.

In any case, the only website I read regularly outside of X is David Cole’s column on Takimag. For those who don’t know, Cole is a hilarious anti-MAGA, anti-Elon conservative. I’d read a grocery list by him, to be honest, because he’s really out there funny. From him, I know that Karen Bass was actually the more conservative among the candidates for LA mayor. The rest were even more bizarre.

So that’s it for link enciclopedias, unfortunately.

In the USSR, nobody ever said we had censorship, although obviously we had extremely restrictive censorship. It wasn’t only that there were many, many things you weren’t allowed to say. There were also things everybody was obligated to say on very regular occasions.

However, it was never openly accepted that we had censorship. To the contrary, saying that there was censorship was censored. Meaning, punished. The official narrative was that we had the greatest freedom on the planet to speak openly about anything.

What was prohibited was “saying untruths” or “spreading disinformation”.

“It’s not censorship we support but fact-checking” is the standard narrative of many authoritarian regimes. Watching Americans replay these tired Soviet arguments with the enthusiasm of recent converts is boring.

Now that we finally know who came up with the idea, we can all calm down.

All of us also deserve a lifelong supply of free ice-cream, excellent weather always, and to live forever. And world peace!

This is not a defense of Musk. This is a defense of adults not talking like 6-year-olds.