"Orthodoxy is Unconsciousness"

"Is there a secret way

Is there a secret door

Do I have to pray

To reach the promised shore?"

In Strict Confidence - Promised Land

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"I think it's easy to say that you distrust the government, that you distrust the state. Again, that's something almost no one will take you up on. But if you say that you are very often pretty sure that it's the majority who is wrong and the way the public opinion is constructed that's wrong, the way that popular mandates are construed that's wrong, then you can be accused of being an elitist or a snob and so on, and then you know you're on to something."

 

Christopher Hitchens - Interview with Harry Kreisler: "A Dissenting Voice", 2002

(Corresponding Conversations with History episode available here)

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"In Christian eyes, Galen was not to be worshipped, God was. Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word "gnostic" comes from the Greek word for "knowledge") that was later declared heretical, didn't help. Heretics were intellectual, therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicty or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated."

Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

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Does anybody actually like Fandom.com?

Wait, backtrack a bit for context. Sam Harris has no tribe.

Wait, more basic than that: if you want some dirt on the Jews, ask the Muslims. If you want some dirt on the Muslims, ask the Christians. If you want some dirt on the Christians, ask the Jews. Fact-check, of course... but the system works. It stops working when you declare one side above criticism and muzzle the others.

I have been muzzled, and I'm not even on anyone's side.

Back in 2012, just three months after I'd started this blog I noted the new pattern of censorship in the modern age was to simply bury the offending material by promoting competing dross. As a corollary, we've now added old-school censorship to that. All through the 2010s, Google has been increasingly abusing its search algorithm to favor certain commercial companies, presumably in exhange for kickbacks. As one example, the website Wikicities/Wikia/Fandom.com has existed for quite some time, as a low-quality, blatantly profiteering and disinterested attempt to cash in on interest in various fictional works, but it rarely held a candle to sites created by actual fans. It was only after being bought up by the investment firm TPG Capital in 2018-2019 that Wikia suddenly skyrocketed to the top of Google hits for... ANYTHING, be it book, game or movie. The site's still crap. But deeper pockets now have an interest in shoveling that crap down your throat, and Google's only too happy to supply the shovel.

This year however saw an obvious escalation in Google's more blatantly censoring your searches under political excuses, morally cleansing the zeitgeist. From the start I have refused to promote this blog in any way, and most of you found it by keyword searches. But since spring, Google hits have dropped to nothing. Key phrases which I knew from experience would previously yield front page or top-line image search hits to my blog suddenly saw me knocked down by several rows and pages. Newer posts, especially containing politically sensitive terminology (just tried "werwolfesden nomenklatura" for instance) don't show up on Google at all. On DuckDuckGo, they still yield first page hits (while Fandom.com drops like a rock) - but then nobody uses DuckDuckGo. I have never relied on a single audience with a single viewpoint. I'm an equal-opportunity snarler. You come, you read for some time, you nod in agreement, you scoff in disdain, maybe you link something of mine to your friends if I'm lucky, then you wander off and others gradually trickle in from search engine hits depending on how much their interests match mine. This was as it should be, the promise of the free internet. No captive audiences. No captive writers. Now, I as many others find myself choked to death by the lack of replenishment. When the last handful of you leave, no-one will know this blog exists, because no-one will be permitted a keyword match. The irony of it being hosted on Google's own servers, of Google censoring itself, does not escape me.

But it's a sign of our times.

On the second of this month, I was struck by a random news story confirming the inevitable: that Black Lives Matter like any martyr cult is among other things a scam, with one of its leaders being accused by peers of having palmed upwards of $10mil. I was struck, I say, because this story had not been included in my Reuters feed. Nor was it present on BBC's U.S. news list, nor on any of the other usual suspects who had done nothing but slavishly adulate the slightest warble from BLM for the past several years. You'd think top-level graft in an organization that can marshall twenty million fanatics to terrorize America for the entire summer of 2020 would warrant some attention, wouldn't you? It took three more days for CNN to grudgingly acknowledge the story, and others still refuse to do so. Wouldn't want our nice shiny cradle for violent racists tarnished by something so crass as a financial scandal, now would we? For a bonus, BLM's finances were already being called into question back in January for long-standing issues of lack of transparency or accountability, having gone dark throughout the preceding year soon after its windfall of support during the George Floyd riots. None of us heard about it back then either, from any major outlet above the city level. Our own morality police decreed it not a topic for polite discussion. For a bonus bonus, just three days before it conspicuously refused to pick up the BLM scandal, Reuters ran a fairly extensive article on censorship in Turkey. Oh, well, so long as the censorship is, y'know, OVER THERE somewhere, okay.

Such media bias is as old as the media, sure, but one thing that has changed is public acceptance. Back in 1980 Isaac Asimov warned (in his article on elitism as a slur) that the public could no longer read, at least not coherently and critically. Forty years later, even the "pointy-headed professors" he lamented were being demonized by the ignorant masses can no longer hold themselves above mindless slogan-chanting. We've become so comfortable with phrases like "through a feminist lens" that even our lobby-appointed intelligentsia get the vapors at analyzing anything except as sanitized through some politically convenient bias. I have bashed and slammed many, many social groups here over the years, from bronies to Trumpists... but ultimately, the ones to silence me were Google, the tech sector, the educated, well-heeled, self-appointed "liberal" inquisitors.

 

As a gratuitously perverse twist, Google censors by using exactly what it prevents others from using: keywords. I very much doubt anyone at the organization sat and pored over my thousand pages of rambling mostly on the topic of goblins and spaceships. Far more likely they simply programmed their search parameters to excommunicate anyone caught using heretical terms like, maybe "misandry" because certain words must be excluded from language, so that the concepts they represent cannot be discussed, analyzed or criticized. Does that remind you of anything?

"Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime."

- see how long before you can no longer Google even that quote because it makes our overlords uncomfortable.