Thread by @KrisAtLarge

let's say person A and person B are arguing on @Twitter (or elsewhere.) it's a political argument, and it's very short:

A: I say that freedom does not exist in a society that permits its police to commit arbitrary homicides at whim. that is not *justice*.

B: word salad🤡

(1/x)

I have now illustrated about three-fourths of the online intellectual activity of the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @GOP crowd—the right-wing fringe, who all try so very hard to pretend that they're not right-wing or conservative or any other known thing, but something *special*.

(2/x)

@jordanbpeterson and @elonmusk, both of whom claim to be professional geniuses, talk this way now; so do most @GOP politicians. the fanbases of @bindelj and @MattWalshBlog and @RichardDawkins talk this way: they think that they win arguments by saying, "you're an idiot."

(3/x)

they all think they're *geniuses*, and how do you know? it's because they think so many things are stupid—only for the "brain-dead" or the "retarded" or the "mentally ill"—@jordanbpeterson, who pretends to be a psychologist, can't tell these three things apart these days.

(4/x)

this is almost certainly how men like @ID_AA_Carmack and @RokoMijic talk—in private, at least; the better-behaved of the rigid, bigoted #STEM Lord set are canny enough to keep the slurs and the "moron" talk to more discreet channels. less disciplined persons don't bother.

(5/x)

it's the simplest way to imitate "intelligence": talk about how stupid everything else, and affect to have very shrewd and complicated ideas about WHY everything is stupid—you don't have to *explain* your Theory of Everything™ but of course it's genius, from a genius.

(6/x)

when the @mtaibbi / @conor64 "influencer" set talk about their "nuance", basically they're referring to this: the idea that they have some intricate and subtle explanation for *everything*, but ordinary people wouldn't understand it anyway so why bother to explain?

(7/x)

these people are *especially* fond of this self-indulgent chat about their Theory-of-Everything explanations of things when it comes to #politics—especially for people they don't know. @mtaibbi's ideology is too "nuanced" for words, but he's an expert on leftist strangers!

(8/x)

truly this is an intellectual disease endemic to Western society, which has been fatally warped by #Christianity and its forcible imposition of unities and rigid formulae on everything. the Theory of Everything that @elonmusk or @jordanbpeterson seem to have is God's Plan.

(9/x)

there's One Way™, no others. God made the Universe with *this* fixed and rigid structure, and no other.

this rigidity and fixation on single explanations for everything has been fully *secularized*: #atheists like @michaelshermer and @RichardDawkins haven't escaped it.

(10/x)

"woke" is an especially popular right-wing Theory of Everything.

"woke" theoreticians like @realchrisrufo and @ConceptualJames have crafted "rational" explanations for *everything* they don't like: "gender ideology", communism, anarchism, Black civil rights struggles...

(11/x)

...they manage to get most of human activity into "woke"; unless it's useful for gaining money or power, the @elonmusk / @mtaibbi / @mtracey people don't have much use for the bulk of human endeavours. there's not a lot of profit in writing sonnets these days.

(12/x)

anyway "woke" is very handy for "rational arguments": if a @mtaibbi or @MrAndyNgo fan gets tired of calling people "moron" over and over, or spamming emoji and memetic GIFs at them, they can always bring out "woke" as a bigger gun.

or "narrative". they love that one too.

(13/x)

I'm writing a narrative. right now. that is what human beings do; that is what communication is about: creating a shared narrative.

I am not intoning absolute truths. as forcibly as I can, I state my *opinions*—@mtaibbi &c. say they welcome those, but it's another lie.

(14/x)

everything about these people is a lie. @elonmusk is a lie—that is to say, the person whom #ElonMusk *thinks he is*, the persona that he wants stamped on the foreheads of all eight billion of us, is smoke and mirrors. it's an *act*. his pal @mtaibbi is _doing a bit_.

(15/x)

@ID_AA_Carmack, @bariweiss, @fchollet, @JeffBezos, @jack, any one of a hundred other people I could name—whose lives I have *invaded*, through this medium of @Twitter which Mr. Dorsey so kindly provided—all these people are actors. they present false faces to the world.

(16/x)

I will still be accused of playacting—I have a theatrical way of writing and talking, and...well, I feel that I'm in the same boat as poor Peter Sellers, who once (it is rumored) said that he'd forgotten the sound of his "real voice". I feel a little false myself.

(17/x)

but I detest falsity—especially my own. I *try* to be as real and straightforward as I can. I'm just one very noisy citizen. maybe I'm *crazy*, but I don't think that should matter. aren't our thoughts supposed to be judged on their own? don't words _stand on their own_?

(18/x)

that's why it's particularly *insulting* to me, how a whole bunch of "rational" people, all of whom seem to think they're the second coming of Richard Feynman (and he was a sack of shıte anyway, as a person), can't even pretend they can keep up a logical argument.

(19/x)

that would mean *respecting the words in front of you*, instead of doing a b.s. Sherlock Scan of the person's bio, then classifying them according to your meticulously racist Theory of Everything—like the ruleset in @ID_AA_Carmack's private RPG model of _the whole world_.

(20/x)

I've been called a "liberal", by people who think that somehow settles the argument, more times than I can remember—on @Twitter, by some ranting nerd in the tow of @jordanbpeterson or @jessesingal or @JackPosobiec or whoever. some "genius" who only speaks in animated GIF.

(21/x)

I'm tearing it all down. I don't care that I'm _alone_. I don't care that I have no social standing—I will rip down #capitalism and #Christianity and the thoroughly *rotten* culture that those two evils have engendered. I think it's a moral imperative. it's this or death.

(22/x)

a society in which @MattWalshBlog or @mtaibbi or @elonmusk can simply *go on*, bulldozing their way through the world doing more and more evil and hiding behind mere _public-relations blithering_ and aggressive social posturing...that's not a society that should exist.

~Chara