This is how progressives have been engineering "democracy" for years now, remember that the idea isn't to engage in discussion/debate, it's to bypass it through carefully designed rhetoric
Big data various iterations of propaganda until you find the form that achieves the goal
This was formerly achieved by passing the winning iteration to journalists who would then distribute it to the public
So once you've got enough data, it becomes possible to program JournoBots to guide unruly citizens through their dialogue tree to reach the approved conclusions
Of course normal people recoil at hearing the NYT say "So we built a little propaganda machine to help you route-around your fellow citizen's concerns in real time lol"
But this is all second nature to journalists, who've been steeped in this process for a long time
Even I would have been at least skeptical of this, mayb even considered it a conspiracy theory, or a "big if true"
Until they began openly bragging about it in their various pieces on "fortifying the election." They're the ones who admitted it, I'm just taking them at their word
And in fairness it's not like rhetoric as a means of shortcutting truth to convince the people is some new thing, I mean the Athenians didn't make it a field of study just for fun
The thing is these processes used to require a human element to them
An actual person getting up there and "fortifying" his logical position with emotion, spirit, bravado, humor, all these things that draw you in to the argument and make you feel part of it, truly believe it, because though these things may be irrational, they are still very real
It might be manipulative, in the sense that it admits it's not "pure reason," and that a man's gut often has as much influence over his decisions as his mind
But you still had to be made to feel it
And that is what exposes this new process for what it is: something with no natural instincts from the gut, something that *fakes* them, by lab-testing your responses to what it wants until it gets what it wants
It is a system, in other words, designed to hack your guts
It's no wonder, then, that's exactly what it feels like to be subjected to it
A process of manipulation, stripped of all the human elements that could make you still feel part of it, until it is fully inhuman, and fully alienating to the people it makes its captives.
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Hard disagree on the first part (if you can even taste tannins an average person should be able to distinguish red from white 90% of the time on that factor alone)
But the overall thrust is right, b/c the main point of criticism is just to find dudes with similar taste to yours
Criticism of any kind involves two main branches of "expertise": sampling way more of the field than anyone normal has any time for, and then applying your specific aesthetic preferences to whatever you've just tasted/read/watched/etc
The first branch is, for almost all people, way more important than the second: so the goal of most criticism *should* be that of a humble aggregator
"I waded through all this so you don't have to, and here's the stuff I'd watch for fun if it wasn't my job"
To understand leftism, you just have to understand its fundamental animating goal, which it turns out is very straightforward: to dissolve us all into interchangeable human gray goo
Once you've got that in place, everything else follows from it
The mind naturally recoils from this goal, because of how unnatural it is. It throws up all kinds of rationalizations, "No, it's about protecting those who can't protect themselves"
Yeah, you're making my point. The value of harm reduction, continued to its end goal, is gray goo
This basic principle immediately exposes the flaw at the core of Marxism, which the modern liberal "right" treats as Ur-Leftism, because the "liberal right" is itself a ridiculous contradiction, doomed by its inability to reach back *beyond* Communism
You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King
"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
lol, right. "We at the highly scrupulous Intercept would never 'expose' our political enemies, who we definitely don't report on because we hate them. We just wait for any outlet with even lower standards to make these people a matter of public interest—and *then* we expose them"
This is Activist Journalism 101, it's a completely incestuous movement, "respected" outlets know they can just sit back and wait for millennial bottom-feeder outlets to "do the work" for them
Then they're allowed to link to it, as legitimate journalism, and launder it upwards
As this process has continued it's become even more pathetic than that, their justification isn't even some VICE article written by a 21-year-old college girl, it's literally "online speculation"
Oh wait "Multiple links to speculation," so now we get to launder it into fact
So while it's true that Trump really didn't even want to do anything that outrageous, the reason the system spent five years squealing like it was dying was because even that much would have kneecapped it
Not ended it, not at all—but crippled it, yes
Look, to me, neoliberalism has two core modules: its economic module, and its social module
Leaving the latter aside, its economic module is globalism, there's no arguing that. And two of the core components of globalism are free movement of goods, and free movement of people