Twatmaturgy

"When one world ends

Something else begins
But without a scream
Just a whisper because we just

Start it over again"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Fall of Adam

 

 

I sort of flaked out of writing an anti-religious Easter post this year, partly because I never stick to any sort of schedule anyhows, and partly because there's simply very little worth saying about faith. It's stupid. I can only repeat that observation in so many ways before getting bored. In fact, as the Antichrist Superstar readily demonstrated, religious behaviors serve better to illustrate the flaws of other human endeavors by analogy. For instance: strength of conviction does not alter the physical laws of the universe. Two thousand years of mandatory celebration have not managed to produce the Zombie Jesus and never will, and no amount of chanting or torturing of infidels will ever turn a church's tap water into bulletproof baby gloss or blood into wine. You can practice yer prostratin' 'til it wins Olympic medals and it will never make that Pinot taste any more like AB-positive.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I've been watching a lot of Last Week Tonight (-'s YouTube-published content) over the past couple of years. As comedy edutaiment it impresses by how often its writers manage to poke fun at otherwise very dry topics... like pennies... or flood insurance... or Britain. On the other hand as a major tool, of the Democratic Party's rabblerousing apparatus, John Oliver makes an ideal case study in the hypocrisy of America's self-appointed left wing and right side of history. Take for instance his 2016 commentary on the Republican National Convention (before the fateful election which stuck the U.S. with 4 years of President Caligula) and the irrational faith in blatant falsehoods displayed there:

 

"what is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true, because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week. It was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts."

 

This is certainly a valid criticism, but:

 

1) Oliver's scripts in each episode have him constantly decrying "that is amazing!" or "that is disgusting!" or "that is horrific!" outright commanding his audience to toggle the switch on its reflexive limbic reactions to every new stimulus every two minutes. Last Week Tonight banks more on selling its audience the cozy feels of a nominal moral high horse than it does on facts, or even humor.

 

2) The Democratic Party's populist rhetoric for the past decade has consisted of posing as saviors by ginning up irrational feelings of oppression. If you'd like to see the doublethink in action, in a segment about America's ill-advised vigillante-friendly "stand your ground" laws, they were perfectly able to identify a problem with basing justified firearm use on fearing for one's life. As Oliver put it:

"it all comes down to perceived fear. Whether you legitimately saw someone as a threat. And that is definitionally subjective. What I am afraid of (snakes, clowns and Tilda Swinton (Jesus Christ!)) might not be what you are."

Their argument further down the line is that white people are more likely to get away with shooting black people by citing fear than the other way around, which is supported not only by a bit of empirical evidence but on theoretical grounds by neoteny. Oversimplified, we have evolved to protect, forgive and favor whatever approaches the appearance of our own species' offspring. The cuter, the more babyish you appear, the easier it is to get away with shit. Africans, broadly generalized, are far down the scale of neoteny within our own species, and the "scary black man" stereotype sells so well as to fund the entire industry of rap music and then some.

Of course, while Last Week Tonight is perfectly capable of using this argument (in all but name) when it comes to white / black relations, they avoid ever naming it outright because they prefer to deliberately ignore its implications within male / female relations where women and men are even farther apart on the neoteny scale. In that arena, the show's writers are perfectly willing to condemn men of anything and everything (evidence and reason be damned) based on women's subjective interpretation of a male threat or oppression. Won't even bother with an example; half of Oliver's jokes consist of mocking a doctored photo of a white male transgressing some arbitrary social norm.

As the show increasingly radicalized over the past couple of years, it ramped up its racism in segments on, for instance Asian Americans which I gave up trying to watch at being told the term "encompasses a vast group who can trace their heritage back to more than 20 countries" - yeah, no shit. Anti-white racists have proclaimed whites' ignorance of the diversity of other geographic regions for decades, all the while ignoring their own ignorance in lumping "white" people together in defiance of several millennia of variable interbreeding with North Africa and western Asia. "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam" as the song goes, but the gleeful butchery among European peoples and their descendants, not to mention the mistreatment in America of German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrants is all too easily ignored when the banner of "diversity" can be raised as a political prop against those born the wrong skin color. The life experiences of a Parisian socialite, a quarter-Tatar Latvian lumberjack, a Greek tour guide and an Irish-descended sorghum farmer from Buttfuck, Alabama can be presumed identical with no fear of being labelled racist so long as the exercise serves a limey propagandist in bashing "white" people as demoniac oppressors. Bleedin' "continentals" wot?

 

But if you'd like to see some real "emphasizing feelings over facts" try transgender rights, a common Democratic Party posturing point on which Oliver has dutifully lost sight of the shores of reality altogether, spewing social justice warrior party lines like "transgender people have a gender identity that differs from the one they were assigned at birth" in the same condescending tone a born-again Christian might inform you of his newfound moral perfection and your damnation as a lowly sinner. Check the by now all-too-familiar lobbyist phrasing:

"people have an identity" as though this subjectively constructed personal identity were immutable, falsifiable and verifiable

"assigned at birth" as though the blatantly observable testicles or ovaries were an alien, arbitrary imposition on the obstetrician's part

By the same rationale, and given sexual reproduction predates human racial divergence by several hundred million years, it would be utterly uncontroversial for Rachel Dolezal to "have a racial identity that differs from the one she was assigned at birth" or for me to claim I'm born-again Taiwanese or the second coming of Timur Lenk. Note, this does not concern rare, verifiable cases of trisomy etc., or the social practices of adopting the dress, habits or mannerisms of the opposite sex, all of which we should be able to accept gratis under the umbrella of personal freedom. Historically, there's nothing particularly unique about eunuchs or viragoes filling various social roles. Society will not crumble for it, no matter if a few evangelical hicks get the vapors.

 

But simply by declaring oneself "transgender" one does not gain the moral or scientific authority to rewrite evolutionary, genetic and embryologic history, to fabricate the "fact" that altering superficialities by cosmetic surgery and hormone shots* can fundamentally (and retroactively!) alter physical reality. No matter how convincing an illusion is, it is still an illusion. The strength of your conviction does not retcon ontology on this point any more than you can bleed Jesus into your cognac snifter.

And on each and every one of these tenets of intersectional faith, if faced with the question of why a particular politically favored group should get to redefine realitity, propagandists like Oliver will fall back on emotional appeal, on emphasizing feelings over facts. It is amazing! It is disgusting! It is horrific! The pain of those born the correct sex or the correct race or the correct sexual orientation or "identity" is presumed more important than lower orders of humans'. The saved are just better than sinners. After all, it is also a simple fact of our naked ape existence that a single "femicide" is more important than the mudane elimination of at least eight disposable males.

We believe it without ever questioning it, and belief makes it true.

______________________________________________

 

* - and let's face it, many of the more opportunistic modern day incarnations put in a lot less effort than that.